Data is a very important part of a software application. To maintain data, we need some kind of database that will store the data in a structured way, so that it can be easily retrieved, saved, updated, and deleted. It's essential that our software is able to communicate with a data source to use the data. The ADO.NET framework provides this facility to .NET developers. Learning and understanding ADO.NET is one of the basic requirements of any .NET developer. In this chapter, we covered the fundamentals of ADO.NET elements, such as DataProviders, Connection, Command, DataReader, and DataAdapter. We also learned how to connect with the SQL Server database and the Oracle Database using ADO.NET. We discussed stored procedures and explained what the Entity Framework is and how to use it.
In the next chapter, we will be talking about a very interesting topic: Reflection...