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Data Access & Databases focuses on the tools and techniques available to publish data on the Web (or other environments) with Microsoft technologies.
We start with ActiveX® Data Objects, the interface to all kinds of data. If you're building Web pages that access databases, Exchange servers, text files, almost any kind of data, you can use ADO, and its set of objects, methods, properties, and collections, to programmatically access and manipulate that data. We have the ADO Reference on the MSDN Online Library, but feel free to waltz on over to the ADO Site.
Remote Data Services is a subset of ADO that allows you to perform additional data manipulation on the client; innovations such as enhanced data binding, client-side caching, or even the ability to host your own business objects remotely are possible with RDS. A subset of the ADO documentation deals exclusively with RDS.
The Tabular Data Control is an ActiveX component that works on Internet Explorer 4.0 and above clients. The TDC gives you the ability to selectively display, edit, sort, and manipulate data on the client without any additional trips to the server (unless you request more data, of course). We also have an article by an IE-HTML Mailing List Contest winner, "Active Twist on the Tabular Data Control", that uses the TDC to stage Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Data Binding is really cool. As we've alluded to in the paragraphs above, data binding is all about keeping data "active" on the page once you've sent it to client browsers. That is, rather than sending down a bunch of information from a database that just sits there, data binding allows you to selectively display and manipulate that data based on user preferences and interactions with the page (without additional trips to the server). We discuss four different types of data providers, the interfaces that "expose" the data to HTML pages via Internet Explorer 4.0 (or the MSHTML parser): a simple tabular-data OLE-DB provider, an OLE-DB provider for Java, a provider that works with C++, and another tabular-data provider that works with Java.
Of course, if all this talk about data binding, business objects, and whatnot is a bit too rich for your taste, there's always the Data Visualization Series of articles. These are designed for those of us who, like the series' author Robert Carter, find the ability to connect to a database and display a table on a Web page worthy of a major celebration. With (more than a little) help from some Microsoft developers, Robert steps through the processes of setting up DSNs, figuring out how to find ISPs, and even some neat tricks for graphically displaying your data.
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