What's New in ADO.NET 2.0?

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Amidst all the hype around Whidbey and Yukon, one area that's been perhaps neglected is the fairly significant changes that have been made to ADO.NET. Having spent a fair amount of time working with customers on data-driven applications, there are a number of questions that I get asked almost every time, including:

  • How do I get ADO.NET to make multiple updates in a single batched operation?
  • How do I implement a data tier which is provider agnostic without resorting to OLE DB?
  • How do I convert a DataReader into a DataSet?
  • How can I optimise DataSet serialisation?
  • How can I use two DataReader objects simultaneously?

None of these are impossible to achieve today, but all of them require a fair amount of work. The good news is that ADO.NET 2.0 provides simple solutions to each of these problems out of the box. There's a new UpdateBatchSize property on DataAdapters, that supports batched updates; there's a provider-agnostic class factory; a Load method on DataTable objects that takes a DataReader as a parameter; there's a new binary serialisation option for DataSets, and finally there's support for Multiple Active Result Sets (MARS) in MDAC 9.0.

Where can you go for more information on these? There's a little bit of information on the ADO.NET website, but today at least that consists primarily of slideware from the PDC. But I was blown away by a great demo from Pablo Castro (one of the ADO.NET PMs) that's just gone live on MSDN TV. Now I have a confession to make - I generally hate webcasts. For some reason, when I'm watching something online my attention span drops off and I start being distracted by email. But Pablo's session was pure demo - no marketing fluff - no explanation of the architecture - just straight into coding C# in Visual Studio 2005. The demo segment is about 20 minutes, and he demonstrates how ADO.NET 2.0 solves at least four of the problems highlighted above. A tip - download the demo file only rather than the full presentation - you can reduce the download from 58MB to 14MB and just miss the 2 minute intro.

Go on - skip browsing aimlessly around the web and take twenty minutes out to learn some really cool stuff - you won't regret it!