ADO.NET Constraint Strategies

Abstract

I just finished another long e-mail exchange with David Sceppa about some of the finer details of ADO.NET. I told him that I didn’t agree with some of the approaches Microsoft has taken toward handling data constraints, referential integrity, and data validation. He reminded me that developers don’t have to use them. That’s very true. IMHO, these features will be handy for a subset of the developers using ADO.NET—but not nearly all. This chapter discusses how ADO.NET has implemented referential and data constraints and also how to specify the relationships between tables in your database. I know, you’ve already done that and you’re wondering why ADO.NET doesn’t figure this out by itself. That’s a question I’m not prepared to answer.