This section introduces you to .NET, ADO.NET, and Visual Studio .NET. You have probably been introduced to .NET by now, and, given the number of marketing channels available to Microsoft, we're fairly sure you have. Since Microsoft is brand- ing nearly all of its products as .NET products, we want to ensure that you under- stand .NET as it pertains to software development. Since we are programmers and not marketing suits, we will define the ubiquitous .NET term in a what can it do for you as a programmer context.

It is also important to bring you up-to-date on ADO. We will explain the history of ActiveX Data Objects and how the many version upgrades through the years have lead to such a strong XML presence and disconnected nature in the current version of ADO. We will also explain how these behaviors were inherited and improved upon in ADO.NET. You should understand the difference between the ADO that you receive in the Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) down- load, and ADO.NET which is part of the .NET Framework. In communicating with other firms and software developers, we found that a percentage of new .NET appli- cations will continue to use classic ADO from within their .NET applications. We show you how and when to interoperate with classic ADO.

Finally, if you'll forgive us, we blatantly devote a whole chapter to all of the bells and whistles in Visual Studio .NET that pertain to generating ADO.NET code. As with classic ADO, ADO.NET is free and doesn't require Visual Studio .NET. It is part of the .Net Framework and will be downloaded and installed accordingly. That hav- ing been said, if you happen to own Visual Studio .NET, we'll show you how quickly you can generate most of the primary objects and accompanying source code to get your data-intensive projects under way.

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