ADO.NET and System.XML V. 2.0--The Beta Version

There are numerous upgrades between .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0. Thankfully, this book focuses strictly on ADO.NET and how System.Xml is utilized with it. Not only do you learn about new capabilities, the authors do a good job of comparing new techniques/capabilities with those from .NET 1.1. You'll want to carefully review the more simplistic methods for asynchronous database calls, XPathNavigator, and notifications. .NET 2.0 is providing you with better and faster ways to work with data. You need to start getting familiar with them prior to the gold release this fall.

This book is a worthy companion to Bob Beauchemin et al's First Look. And that is saying a lot. David Sussman and Alex Homer have always written like they are trying to communicate rather than fill up another book. Mark Fussell joins the gang in an admirable way. This book is not a fluffy introduction; it is a pretty dense explanation and reference of this new technology. There are plenty of detailed code examples that serve as a tutorial. For a couple years now, Dare Obasanjo has been yelling from the mountain top - Use XPathNavigator! Use XPathNavigator. For that matter, so has Mark himself in his writings on the web. Now with v.2 XPathNavigator is editable. And, as I now understand from reading this book, it is conceptually a `higher' object that the current Xml Dom. Now I get it! Few books will give the XPathNavigator its due as this one does. Microsoft's Xml Schema objects are pretty complicated. This is so to a great extent because Microsoft sticks pretty close to modeling its objects after the w3 consortium's standards. Now, I understand this thanks to chapter 11. And I was able to do some things with schema that before I haven't known where to start. There have been some changes to ADO.Net since the books release. Microsoft has wisely chosen do away with some new objects for connecting to the database in a stored procedure. [...] There have been other changes too where some new features were just too complicated (Table Value Functions). This is a bummer, but still the value of this book's 528 pages far outweigh the 4 or 5 outdated pages. SQL Server 2005 is an extraordinary product. Jump on board, get your seats! This book is your ticket.

This book shows how Microsoft supports XML as one of the core standards for interacting with its SQL Server database and with its entire .NET framework. The book divides into two parts. The first deals with pure ADO.NET improvements. Many of these. Perhaps the most tangible of which can lead to you writing less code, and hence [hopefully] more robust code. It will depend a lot on the reader, but for me, I found the main thrust of the book to be in the second section. Which concentrates on showing how ADO.NET handles XML. You can see how it can publish relational data very naturally in an XML format. Indeed, the book shows how XML has the expressive power to also represent semistructured data that is inherently awkward to store in a relational database. (Except perhaps as a blob. But that just treats it as an opaque unitary entity, which is of limited use.) A constant message in this part of the book is showing how System.XML is thoroughly integrated with ADO and with all of .NET. Professionally, if you are dealing with ADO or any other aspect of .NET, you need to bone up on System.XML.