Professional in C# and Visual Basic Part 5. Building on the revolutionary release, adds several key new developer features including AJAX, LINQ, and a new CSS designer in Visual Web Developer 2008. The dramatic reduction in code that developers realized from the more than 50 new server controls in now allows developers the time to make their applications more interactive with AJAX, to work with data in their preferred language with LINQ, and to build visually attractive and consistent standards-based sites with CSS. . | Introduction Objects for Accessing Data One of the more code-intensive tasks in was the retrieval of data. In many cases this meant working with a number of objects. If you have been working with for a while you know that it was an involved process to display data from a Microsoft SQL Server table within a DataGrid server control. For instance you first had to create a number of new objects. They included a SqlConnection object followed by a SqlCommand object. When those objects were in place you then created a SqlDataReader to populate your DataGrid by binding the result to the DataGrid. In the end a table appeared containing the contents of the data you were retrieving such as the Customers table from the Northwind database . today eliminates this intensive procedure with the introduction of a set of objects that work specifically with data access and retrieval. These new data controls are so easy to use that you access and retrieve data to populate your server controls without writing any code. You saw an example of this in Listing I-2 where an asp SqlDataSource server control retrieved rows of data from the Customers table in the Northwind database from SQL Server. This SqlDataSource server control was then bound to the new GridView server control via the use of simple attributes within the GridView control itself. It really could not be any easier The great news about this functionality is that it is not limited to just Microsoft s SQL Server. In fact several data source server controls are at your disposal. You also have the capability to create your own. In addition to the SqlDataSource server control includes the AccessDataSource XmlDataSource ObjectDataSource SiteMapDataSource and the new LinqDataSource server control. You use all these data controls later in this book. What You Need for You might find it best to install Visual Studio 2008 to work through the examples in this book you can however
