Data Access Improvements Aimed at SQL

Visual Studio (VS) 2005 and the ADO.NET 2.0 data-access APIs support the new SQL Server 2005 server-side programming system, which integrates important parts of the .NET development platform. This integration, along with better tools for building database applications, could help developers build applications faster and take advantage of new features in SQL Server 2005. In addition, VS 2005 brings back a number of important Visual Basic (VB) data-access features that were lost when VB made the transition from VB6 to VB.NET. This could encourage developers using older versions of VB to jump to .NET.

.NET Comes to SQL Server

VS 2005 includes new features to support SQL Server 2005’s integration of the .NET Framework Common Language Runtime (CLR), the software component that loads and runs applications written in languages such as C# and VB.NET, as well as portions of the .NET Framework APIs. Integrating the CLR into SQL Server 2005 allows server-side database application code, such as stored procedures, to be written using those languages rather than Microsoft’s Transact SQL (T-SQL) dialect of the SQL database query language. This gives developers a simpler, more reliable way to write server-side database code, which in turn can yield important performance and maintenance advantages. (For a discussion of why a developer might want to use a .NET language rather than T-SQL, see the sidebar “Why Build Database Code with .NET?“.)