Introduction to ADO .NET
ADO.NET provides a bridge between the front end controls and the back end database. The ADO.NET objects encapsulate all the data access operations and the controls interact with these objects to display data, thus hiding the details of movement of data. The dataset represents a subset of the database. It does not have a continuous connection to the database. To update the database a reconnection is required. The DataSet contains DataTable objects and DataRelation objects.
ADO.NET Job Support
The ADO.NET is an object-oriented set of libraries that allows you to interact with the data sources. Commonly, the data source is an database, but it could also be a text file, an Excel spreadsheet, or an XML file.
As you are aware off, probably there are many different types of databases available. For example, there is the Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, Oracle, Borland Interbase, & IBM DB2, just to name a few.
Nowadays the Entity Framework is the most promoted database query technology from .NET ecosystem. The good reason though, because it allows developers without extensive knowledge about the SQL to interrogate the database, create complex queries & generate classes with the help of an user-friendly interface.
The ADO.NET comes with an cost. It doesn’t have any user interface to help you the design stuff. Everything needs to be made manually. Of course there are third party tools that can generate the SQL queries for you or to create the classes based on your database structure but comparing to the Entity Framework, it doesn’t provide you all these features out of the box.
The ADO.NET allows us to interact with the various types of data sources & different types of databases. However, there isn’t an single set of classes that allow you to accomplish this universally.