Easing Transition From ASP and ADO to ASP.NET and ADO.Net Part 1/2 (Page 1 of 5 )
You shouldn't have to learn six objects beginning with the word "Data" to start using ADO.NET. More importantly, you shouldn't have to depend on learning a brand new object model for Microsoft's DataGrid object to customize the HTML you're sending to the end user. In this article Ruffin compares classic ASP and ADO to Microsoft's ASP.NET and ADO.NET technologies, easing the transition to ADO.NET for current ADO developers.You shouldn't have to learn six objects beginning with the word "Data" to start using ADO.NET. More importantly, you shouldn't have to depend on learning a brand new object model for Microsoft's DataGrid object to customize the HTML you’re sending to the end user. You've been coding web-based systems in classic ASP for years, and most of your ASP skills do actually carry over to ASP.NET!
Microsoft seems to be trying hard to make programming for the web exactly parallel to stand-alone application programming, and to these ends Microsoft has made the controls in .NET web forms closely match those found in Windows forms. By doing so, the code used to create a GUI for a .NET Windows application can (with a minimum of tweaking) be used on the Internet as well. This opens up a whole new world to yesterday's Visual Basic 6.0 programmers, without learning the in's and out's of multiple browsers, HTML, XML, JavaScript, and all of the other technologies that we've been learning to make a living for the last few years.
Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn't done the same thing for HTML/ASP programmers interested in creating stand-alone applications. Not surprisingly, raw HTML has been hidden in .NET more often than not in recent examples, seemingly rendering classic ASP programmers' in-depth HTML experience as void.
In this article we'll cut to the chase from a classic ASP programmer's point of view and assume that you've learned more than enough HTML to create pages with a little more functionality than Microsoft's generic controls. We'll introduce the minimum number of .NET concepts in this article, one at a time, and will often use classic ASP code examples to ease your transition from classic ASP/ADO to ASP.NET/ADO.NET.
I'm going to be using Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 as my database in these examples and I'll use the "pubs" database so that you can test the support files for this article on your machine. I'll be coding up several aspx pages with C# as well.
Next: Making the connection >>
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