Please Post Opinions on ASP.NET Development Methodologies

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  12 years ago

  by trycki

  Stephen Plumridge

  Sunshine Coast, Australia

  Joined 12 years ago
  I have been developing in ASP and PHP and recently started ASP.NET I have heard conflicting stories on what method to adopt. Is it 1 - Table Adapters? or create your 2 - Data Objects in Code ? I prefer the second option because it is fairly close to what I had adopted in ASP. I am being told by co-workers that the professionals use table adapters and my method is archaic (I have read the opposite on the web). I spoke with some development houses and they use the coded objects. The table adapter method seems a little too Fisher-Pricey for me, I hate wizards, and debugging is harder with table adapters. WHAT DO YOU THINK??? Trycki
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  12 years ago

  by James Crowley

  James Crowley

  London, United Kingdom

  Joined 20 years ago
  Welcome to developerFusion! That's a good question - and to some extent, it's a matter of preference, because there's many ways to architect your application. Creating your business objects, and a corresponding data access layer responsible for managing the interaction between the database and your code is generally a rock solid option to go for. It's strongly typed and you're abstracting away the database layer from your presentation and business logic. Table adapters and the ASP.NET data sources that you declare inline in the ASPX pages tend to break this seperation entirely (or at the very least, encourage you to do so) - but is still possible to do it "right", with strongly typed DataSets and the like. Have a look at [http://www.asp.net/learn/data-access/](http://www.asp.net/learn/data-access/) You might also want to look into ORM (object-relational-mapper) tools such as nHibernate - which either create your .NET objects for you (based on your database schema) or create your database schema based on the .NET objects... along with providing any API for writing queries. If you're using ASP.NET 3.5, I'd strongly recommend you look into LINQ and the Entity Framework - both of these allow something similar. You can learn about LINQ here: [http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/csharp/IntroducingLINQ1.aspx](http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/csharp/IntroducingLINQ1.aspx) Sorry - as you're probably guessing now, there's no "right" answer. But hopefully this has given you a few things to go away and look in to further, and get a better idea what might work for you? Feel free to come back with questions - it's quite a broad area!!
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