.NET Rocks! on Data Access Options

Recently .NET Rocks! talked to Stephen Forte and covered a topic I have been interested in for a a couple of years: Data Access Options.  Clearly this has been a space of a lot of innovation in the last few years.  Stephen does a good job of explaining the benefits customers are getting out of that innovation but he also gives us at Microsoft a few points to consider on the technology options.

Of course one of my favorite parts starts right at the end when Richard asks Stephen about .NET RIA Services. It is about at minute 47 if you want to skip ahead to it ;-).    Stephen clearly sees RIA Services as more than Silverlight as it hooks into ASP.NET… he also sees how it shields the developer from the unnecessarily complex code. 

Enjoy!

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 13, 2009
  I like this topic too. I am still using ADO.NET because it is sufficient and waited for the time that others had figured out what's best to use. It looks like this time has come. Finally a discussion on what to use when. Now in his interview Stephen says that using Silverlight with ADO.NET (and WCF) is ugly because it would involve DataSets. I use (like John Papa shows in his book - Ch. 6) DataReaders to create generic lists. Nothing ugly about that. A bit more typing (I guess), but that takes less than 5% of all development time. Can we conclude that if the database tables closely reflect the application domain entities, ADO.NET works just fine (and fast)?