Now that we have a new computing paradigm, Cloud Computing, how can Clouds help our data? Replace our internal data vaults as we hoped Grids would? Are Grids dead now that we have Clouds? Despite all the promising developments in the Grid and Cloud computing space, and the avalanche of...

The other day I ran into a blog entry from the Astoria team discussing the projections feature of the 1.5 CTP2 version of the product. If you're not familiar with ADO.NET Data Services (formerly codenamed Astoria), it's basically a layer that you can put on to...

Excellent support from Oracle to its products has prompted (it appears) Microsoft to deprecate the System.Data.OracleClient. The developers will of course migrate their applications that use this product. The comparison listing of ODP.NET and Microsoft Oracle Client shows a lot of ...

CLINQ v1.1 has been released. Some of you may have already downloaded some of the new builds, but here's a rundown of what the new release includes: Support for Continuous Aggregation. Now, in addition to being able to have your result sets automatically update themselves in response t...

So you're building your data-driven application and you've got an ADO.NET Entity Model that represents an abstraction around your database. Maybe you're even pretty savvy and you've used inheritance and some filters to enhance the entity model so that it really is an entity model and n...

ADO.NET is the managed code library for the .NET Framework. Its ancestors include ODBC, DAO, RDO, ADO, and OleDB. Some of these technologies still exist in the framework, but most developers rely on the resources provided in the ADO.NET namespaces. There are evolutionary changes in ADO...

In the early 1990s, I was working on a project in which we were creating an accounts receivable system. Because the users of the system would be dealing with people whose accounts were past due, the major concern of the client was that the windows open as quickly as possible. The ultim...

Object Role Modeling (ORM) is an excellent modeling methodology that you can use to construct a conceptual database model. This article is the second in a series of articles that introduce ORM.

Most developers have faced situations in which they need to read data from a file of some given format but can find no real library routines for this purpose, other than the standard file-handling libraries. In such cases, they would have to develop code to calculate the addresses of v...

It is no secret that proper modeling when developing complex, multitiered applications is vital to the success of a project. Countless studies investigating the poor success rate of enterprise-level application projects point to a lack of adequate modeling and design techniques as ...

More and more, enterprise users are moving into mobile work scenarios in which a network connection is not always possible and the traditional PC is too cumbersome. In order to reach such users, we as developers need to get our skills and systems up to speed with mobile development. .N...

Microsoft's development tools are justly famous for their ease of use, and many developers have had the pleasure of impressing their boss with an exciting application that they knocked together in an afternoon. Many developers have also faced the disappointment of finding that the tech...

ADO.NET, the classes found in the System.Data namespace in Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET), provides a wealth of functionality to developers who need to manipulate data, which, as it turns out, includes most all VS.NET developers. One of its interesting characteristics is that you can use ...