Using the Enterprise Library Data Access Block for .NET 2.0

DO .NET provides many rich features that can be used to retrieve and display data in a number of ways, but even given such flexibility, sometimes developers find themselves repeating the same code again and again. For example, every data-driven application requires access to a database. You need to write code to connect to the database, open a connection, execute dynamic SQL or stored procedures, retrieve the results, and close the connection. In other words, this is "plumbing" code that you will be forced to write in almost any application you develop, even though it doesn't add any value to the core business users.

Typically, the only things in this code that might differ between applications are the SQL statements or stored procedure names, the command parameters, and the connection string. As long as you can parameterize these variables, you can abstract most of the plumbing code into reusable classes that can be leveraged across multiple applications. That's a worthwhile effort—but it's no longer worth doing yourself, because that's exactly what Microsoft (with community support) has done in its set of Enterprise Library (known as EntLib) Application Blocks. This article introduces the EntLib Data Access Block by showing examples of how to use it to write robust data access code.