SUMMARY
This short first chapter aims to get you familiar with the overall enhancements to version 2.0 of the .NET Framework over version 1.0 that concern data management using ADO.NET and the classes from the System.Xml and subsidiary namespaces. As well as summarizing these as simple lists, we've attempted to fill out the picture a little by including some back ground on why they have come about and Microsoft's aims as far as developers are concerned.
We also spent some time looking at the area of XML data management within the .NET Framework, to make sure you appreciate the growing importance and widening acceptance of XML as a data persistence, manipulation, and transmission format. As new business applications and software suites appear (such as Microsoft Office System, SharePoint, and so on), the use of and dependence on XML can only continue to grow.
We then briefly overviewed the way that XML is managed within .NET, in both versions 1.0 and 2.0, to reinforce the direction in which development of the Framework is moving. The concept of relational and XML data as being two different entities is rapidly disappearing, and the forthcoming opportunities to construct XML data and schema repositories based on SQL Server will only help to accelerate this change.
Finally, after a quick look at how the changes to ADO.NET affect (or, in fact, do not affect) ASP.NET data binding, we ended the chapter with a brief outline of the content in the remainder of this book. This should help you to dive in and see the areas that are of particular interest to you.
As we stated earlier, the Technology Preview release of the .NET Framework version 2.0 is by no means a complete view of all the features that will be present in the final release. One area that Microsoft is working on, but which has not been finalised yet, is a new class that simplifies relational data management. Early prototypes indicate that it will remove the need for developers to explicitly create intermediate class instances such as Connection, Command, and DataAdapter by using sensible default values and internal heuristics. This feature, providing characteristics similar to but extending the existing DataTable class, should find its way into forthcoming Beta releases of the Framework.
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