Reading Data into an ASP.NET Page

All right, so you're tired of hearing the theory and concepts behind ADO.NET. Me too. Let's look at and discuss some techniques and code that will allow us to read data into our ASP.NET web pages. I am going to be using the "pubs" database that ships with SQL Server to demonstrate the examples. I will also be introducing one ASP.NET control that we are going to use to display the data we retrieve: the ASP DataGrid. Although this control will not be covered at length, you will get a sense of its basic functionality and how ASP.NET strives to separate presentation and business logic.



First of all, I'm going to show you all of the code for a small data access program. Take a minute and look over all the code for this example. Don't worry if you don't understand what's going on, I will explain each line.