In recent years, Microsoft has
been promoting a new software development platform for Windows, known as the .NET Framework. The
.NET Framework is Microsoft's replacement for Component Object Model
(COM) technology. The following points highlight the key .NET Framework
features:
- You can code .NET applications in over forty different programming
languages. The most popular languages for .NET development are C#
and Visual Basic .NET.
- The .NET Framework class library provides the building blocks
with which you build .NET applications. This class library is language
agnostic and provides interfaces to operating system and application
services.
- Your .NET application (regardless of language) compiles into Intermediate
Language (IL), a type of bytecode.
- The Common Language Runtime (CLR) is the heart of the .NET Framework,
compiling the IL code on the fly, and then running it. In running
the compiled IL code, the CLR activates objects, verifies their security
clearance, allocates their memory, executes them, and cleans up their
memory once execution is finished.
Through these features, the .NET Framework facilitates a wide
variety of application implementations (for example, Windows forms, web forms, and web services),
rapid application development, and secure application deployment.
COM and COM+ proved to be inadequate or cumbersome for all the aforementioned
features.
The .NET Framework provides extensive data access support through
ADO.NET. ADO.NET supports both connected and disconnected access.
The key component of disconnected data access in ADO.NET is the DataSet
class, instances of which act as a database cache that resides in
your application's memory.
For both connected and disconnected access, your applications use
databases through what's known as a data provider. Various database
products include their own .NET data providers for, including DB2® for Windows.
A .NET data provider features implementations of the following
basic classes:
- Connection: Establishes and manages a database connection.
- Command: Executes an SQL statement against a database.
- DataReader: Reads and returns result set data from a database.
- DataAdapter: Links a DataSet instance to a database. Through a
DataAdapter instance, the DataSet can read and write database table
data.
Microsoft provides two
data providers, the OLE DB .NET Data Provider and ODBC .NET Data Provider.
The OLE DB .NET Data Provider is a bridge provider that feeds ADO.NET
requests to the IBM® OLE DB Provider
(by way of the COM interop module). ODBC .NET Data Provider is a bridge
provider that feeds ADO.NET requests to the IBM ODBC Driver. These .NET data provider are
not recommended for access to DB2 family
databases. The IBM Data Server
Provider for .NET is a high performance, managed ADO.NET data provider.
This is the recommended .NET data provider for use with DB2 family databases. ADO.NET database access
using the IBM Data Server Provider
for .NET has fewer restrictions, and provides significantly better
performance than the OLE DB and ODBC .NET bridge providers.