>Newbie to .NET data apps here, coming from a Visual Foxpro background.
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>I'm planning on an ASP.NET and/or Silverlight UI, and maybe some WPF client stuff too on our LAN too, so I want to craft a data access layer that can support all these front ends.
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>My data will be in SQL server. I have already made a test run of pushing the data from Foxpro to SQL Server 2005. It went well. That gave me a SQL server data store to play with.
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>Now, here are the data tools I played with so far, trying to get familiar with .NET data access:
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>1. I've played with Linq-To-Sql, and made a test form using the typed objects and collections from L2S, and then populating some WPF listviews and other UI controls. That was cool. Linq is cool! WPF is cool. See screenshot of form here: http://twitpic.com/26w26/full
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>and
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>2. I've played with what I guess you'd call classic ADO.Net DataSets. Man, DataSets seem like a lot of work... A SQLConncetion A SQLCommand A DataSet A TableAdapter
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>...and worst of all, I had to type SQL code within quotes, with absolutely no help from the IDE to to keep me from making typing errors, or writing just plain wrong SQL code, and I had to know the columns names from my data table every time. Lots of room for errors! And query parameters, yuck.
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>So, let me ask.... does the .NET developer community really work with SQLCmds, DataSets, and DataTables to read and write data? Is that how it works?
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>I know all about the O/RM battles out there, and EF too.
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>It sure looks like you can hook up any of the UI controls from ASP.NET/Silverlight/WPF/and WinForms to either Object collections (via OR/M) or DataSets/DataTables, right? Is it always a choice between one of those two?
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>So, it's decision time for me, but, I don't know that to choose. They all seem to work, but that darn DataSet thing just seems scary to me, but, somehow, it also seems to be commonly used.

DataSets are not so bad. Just think of them having most of the features of databases, except in memory and not directly linked to the database.

If you haven't already done this, VS has some nice wizards which may up your enthusiasm for working with DataSets. First, create a Data Source. Then drag and drop tables and/or fields from the Data Source window to a form. VS will create DataGridViews and textboxes on the form, all of them bound. It will also generate gobs of code for managing the DataSet and TableAdapters. The connection string will be captured via a wizard and put into the project's app.config file, creating one if necessary. It's a pretty impressive wizard show.