Creating a Simple Database Application

Summary

In this chapter you built a simple application without looking in detail at how the code works. Instead, you relied heavily on the rapid application development (RAD) features of Visual Studio .NET. With just a few clicks and a minimal amount of coding, you created some quite powerful functionality. As you worked through the chapter, you learned the following:

• How to create a blank solution and add a Windows Forms project to it

• What Visual Studio .NET creates for you when you create a VB .NET Windows Forms application

• How to add data connectivity to your application using Server Explorer and, by a similar process, how to create a data adapter and dataset

• How to create a user interface with controls and bind data to them

• How to get your application to update the database dynamically

• How to use the Data Form Wizard

You’ll learn much more about ADO.NET components starting with Chapter 4, but before you dive in, you’ll look at the most important tool in the database application developer’s toolkit, the international standard database language SQL.