Ever wanted to combine the power and ease of the .NET platform with a free database like MySQL? Well thanks to ODBC database functions in ADO.NET it's really easy. All you need is the latest drivers for ADO.NET and MySQL installed. For this tutorial we will use C# to build a simple application for reading a table built in MySQL. This assumes at least basic knowledge of C# and .NET.

Creating the Database

To start the project, we will need to create a mysql database to work with. Create a new database called mysqlsample and create a new table like this:

mysql> create database mysqlsample;

mysql> use mysqlsample;

mysql> create table tutorials (id int not null auto_increment, title varchar(80) not null, link varchar(255) not null, primary key(id));

mysql> insert into tutorials values (1, ‘DOT.NET For Dummies', ‘http://www.dotnetfordummies.com');

mysql> insert into tutorials values (2, ‘XML For Idiots', ‘http://www.xmlforidiots.com');

mysql> insert into tutorials values (3, ‘Windows For Wimps', ‘http://www.windowsforwimps.com');