Republished With Permission - Original Article

One of my goals over the next few weeks is to publish a number of quick tutorial postings that walkthrough implementing common data binding design patterns using ASP.NET 2.0 (master details, filtering, sorting, paging, 2-way data-binding, editing, insertion, deletion, hierarchical data browsing, hierarchical drill-down, optimistic concurrency, etc, etc).

To help keep these samples shorter, and to help link them together, I’m going to use a common DAL (data access layer) implementation across the samples that is based on SQL Server’s Northwind sample database.

To build the DAL layer I decided to use the new DataSet Designer that is built-into Visual Web Developer (which you can download for free) as well as VS 2005, and which provides an easy way to create and encapsulate data access components within an application.  I’ve used it for a few samples lately, and have found it pretty useful and flexible.  I really like the fact that it enables me to avoid having to write tedious data access code, while still preserving full control over my SQL data logic (I also like the fact that it enables me to use both standard SQL statements as well as SPROCs).

One of the things that I’ve noticed is that there aren’t a lot of end-to-end tutorials that show off how to build and use a DAL with the designer (one exception is the great write-up by Brian Noyes – who includes samples of how to use it with SPROCs).  What I’ve tried to-do with the below set of tutorials is provide an end-to-end, step-by-step, walkthrough that covers all of the core concepts involved in creating and consuming a DAL built with the data designer. 

Using the data designer and ASP.NET 2.0 together, you should be able to create a core DAL implementation and build from scratch a data-driven UI web app on top of an existing database very quickly (~10-15 minutes to build an application from scratch that supports master/details filtering along with data paging, sorting, insertion, and editing).

The final result of the below walkthroughs can be downloaded here.  This download includes all of the code samples as well as the DAL built up below.

I’ll then be posting lots of (much shorter! <g>) blog posting over the next few weeks that show off common data-UI patterns that use it.