ADO.NET for Not Yet Techies

ADO.NET has a long history. It started out as Microsoft's technology for changing data across programs, (Object Linking and Embedding) OLE. I can recall trying to figure that out when I was creating Paradox databases many years ago. I never became expert, but did become excited when I succeeded in making data in one database change when I input the change to another database. ADO.NET begins there.

Eventually OLE evolved into an across the net known as ActiveX, which seemed to be Microsoft's answer to Java applets - small programs that could be downloaded and run on your computer, only without the built in security controls, which made people suspicious of them.

ActiveX became ADO, Active Direct Objects based on Microsoft's across network communications technology, COM. ADO was part of COM+. ADO.NET is ADO taken to Microsoft's .NET initiative to connect the entire computing world -- to our hopeful benefit and of course to their profit.

That is basically what computers are all about, after all.

ADO.NET can access relational databases and XML data.

XML is too complicated to explain here. It basically is a language which carries with it information about its data. Remember the old Waltons character named John Boy? XML is like, the "boy" is not part of the name but a way of telling you that John is a boy rather than a girl or a man. When he grows up, you'd say John Man.

Some Asian languages have a similar way of communicating. In Lao, if you say "fah" it means sky. But if you say the classification word for color, "si" first, "si fah" means literally "color sky" or, in English, blue.

It operates statelessly.

Over the net, an ASP.NET application on a web site asks ADO.NET to access a database management system (such as Access, My SQL, SQL Server or Oracle) for some information (such as more information on a new product you are looking at).

For security, you should keep web pages and the database in a separate folder on the web server.

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