Explore the Data Access Options in Visual Studio 2008

n Visual Studio 2008 running on the .NET framework 3.5, developers can not only create DataReaders and DataSets; Microsoft has also added LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework, and ADO.NET Data Services, which leverages the first two. These new options of course, mean that you have new syntaxes to learn. LINQ, which is built into Visual Basic and C#, has one implementation for LINQ to SQL and another for LINQ to Entities. In Entity Framework, you have the option to use LINQ to Entities or make queries in two other ways with Entity SQL (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Data Access Options in .NET 3.5: Of the six data access options available, four are new.

In all, developers have gone from one "out-of-the-box" data access option plus a native query language of choice (e.g. T-SQL) to six different data access options with new query syntaxes. That sounds pretty scary. On the other hand, having a range of choices offers developers the flexibility to choose the right tool for the job rather than have to constantly "make do" with the existing tools.