This series of articles aims to introduce you to the use of ADO.NET. However, unlike other tutorials, I will concentrate on showing you how to communicate with your database programmatically (i.e. no wizards). This article will make use of an Address Book program to take you through the various aspects of database programming and who knows, by the end of it, you may decide to make use of the program to store all of those hundreds of contacts that you have.

Part one will look at the basic outline of the user interface and will include the necessary code to connect to the database and retrieve all of your contacts for displaying on the form.

Part two will go further and show you how to filter the data and modify the data including saving new contact information and deleting existing contact information.

Part one and two will make use of an Access database. However, Part three will use an SQL Server database and show you how to use Stored Procedures to access and modify the data. The user interface and functionality will remain the same, only the database used will change.