ADO.NET – The Blog of Colin Mackay

How to get a value from a text box into the database

This question was asked on a forum and I took some time to construct a reasonably lengthy reply so I’m copying it to my blog for a bit of permanence. I suspect that many of my regular readers will be dismayed at the lack of proper architecture (e.g. layering) but we all had to start […]

Tip of the Day #4 (Connection Strings in Config files)

From .NET 2.0 onwards a new and improved configuration management system has been put in place. You can now add a <connectionString> element to the config file and use it to place the connection strings to the database and then retrieve then in a consistent way in your application. It supports multiple connection strings too […]

Inserting geometry through a .NET Application

THIS POST REFERS TO THE NOVEMBER 2007 CTP (CTP 5) OF SQL SERVER 2008 Following from my previous posts (Getting started with Spatial Data in SQL Server 2008, Spatial Data in a .NET application) on the new spatial features of SQL Server 2008 I’ve been looking at how to get spatial data into SQL Server […]

Spatial Data in a .NET application

THIS POST REFERS TO THE NOVEMBER 2007 CTP (CTP 5) OF SQL SERVER 2008 Following from my last post about Getting Started with Spatial Data in SQL Server 2008 in the database, how about actually using it in an application? Since that is where most data will end up at some point, it must be […]

What is a DAL?

I occasionally see posts on forums asking for help with some database problem. Then I see they’ve been using the the wizards in Visual Studio (which is okay for a beginner, but should really be ditched once the basic concepts have been learned). I suggest that they use a DAL and I get lots of […]

SQL Injection Attacks

Every day I see messages on various forums asking for help with SQL. Nothing wrong with that. People want to understand how something works, or have a partial understanding but something is keeping them from completing their task. However, I frequently also see messages that have SQL statements being built in C# or VB.NET that are extremely […]