ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) is the data access model provided for Visual Basic users to write applications for the Microsoft Windows platform. ADO is also used by VBScript, which is a specialized language that is used primarily to program functionality for web pages. ADO provides a relational view of data through the Connection, Command and Recordset objects.
ActiveX Data Objects for .NET (ADO.NET) provides a clean data access model for .NET that is both familiar to the users of ADO and addresses the .NET world with new objects like the ADO.NET DataSet. ADO.NET has been designed to be the single data access model used by all server processes and applications running on the Microsoft platform.
An ADO.NET (ActiveX Data Objects for .NET) data provider enables an ADO.NET application to connect to one or more data sources to access data. The ADO.NET data standard by Microsoft provides a uniform method to access data from a number of data sources, leveraging both relational, as well as those exposed via XML. The ADO.NET data standard is used in the .NET environment. It encapsulates ways to connect to a database and access data be it relational, XML, or application specific, and it enables application developers to retrieve the results.
ADO.NET therefore provides a clean data access model for .NET that is both familiar to the users of ADO and addresses the .NET world with new objects like the ADO.NET DataSet. The ADO.NET data standard has been designed to be the single data access model used by all server processes and applications running on the Microsoft platform.
