Data Access in ASP.NET 2.0

ASP.NET 2.0 reduces the amount of code required to perform common data access tasks by adding a number of data-enabled controls. This article shows these new controls, and how you can use them in your applications.

Data access has always been a crucial aspect of Web application development. Data-driven Web pages are essential for almost every business application. Because data access is so prevalent, it makes little sense for developers to spend time continually re-generating complex code for simple database tasks. Developers need to be able to rapidly access data from a variety of sources in a variety of formats. Fortunately, ADO.NET 2.0 and the new data access controls in ASP.NET 2.0 help solve this problem.

For traditional ASP and ASP.NET 1.1 applications, the developer had to create code to access and update a database, as well as to format the retrieved data as browser-friendly HTML. Although Visual Studio .NET had a wizard to help with this task, advanced features such as paging and sorting still required intricate synchronization between the back-end code and the front-end display. Quite often, this code was difficult to maintain and synchronize, especially if the database changed or additional data had to be displayed on the page. In addition, the proliferation of XML as a data store required extensive lines of plumbing code intermixed with data access logic.

To increase developer productivity and the performance of Web applications, ASP.NET 2.0 reduces the code needed to access and display data, by encapsulating functionality in new data controls that give you more control and flexibility with your data. These controls can be linked to a wide variety of data sources, ranging from traditional databases to XML data stores. All of the data sources are treated in a similar fashion, greatly reducing the complexity of developing data-driven applications. The ASP.NET 2.0 internal support for these features required extensive architectural enhancements. The new data source objects incorporate a number of industry accepted best practices to augment a very robust foundation. The data access tools available in ASP.NET 2.0 can now be leveraged by the most complex applications. Binding and caching issues that limited ASP.NET 1.x implementations have been resolved in ASP.NET 2.0, both architecturally and mechanically.