Data Access With ADO.NET

Writing a data access layer (DAL) for .NET using C# can be a tedious process. Following the best practices laid out in the IBuySpy.com sample site means creating a lot of method calls to wrap stored procedure calls. This is not all that different from how one would accomplish the same task using Visual Basic 6 and COM, but the tediousness is somewhat increased by the apparent increase in the number of lines of code required to perform the task. Scott Guthrie has written a wizard tool that helps a bit with this process (not sure if it has been updated from Beta 1 yet), which you can try here. However, even then you end up with a LOT of code for this relatively simple task. For example, for this call to return a collection of articles which only uses one stored procedure parameter, it requires 3 lines of code for this one parameter. That's 1/3 of the whole function, and this only gets worse for functions that require multiple parameters (as most do).