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C# Databases - Lessons


Introduction to Database Management Systems

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Database Management Systems manage very large quantities of data. They’ve been around since the 1960s. They were developed to provide information about large amounts of data. And that’s the key – information. Data, by itself, doesn’t buy you much. Data related to other pieces of data provides information. And information is the reason for organizing data.

The purpose of this video is to introduce you to how a database is organized and how it fits into the picture when used in an application. It will also introduce you to the fact that there are many database engines, each of which is quite capable of organizing your data. We’ll look at one in this video and learn to set up the database and its tables.

Yes, there is much more to learn but this will get us started on a journey that will let you incorporate databases into many of your applications.

PDFs: Slides


Creating a Database in Visual Studio

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This lesson introduces you to the components that are the connections pieces to a .NET application. There is the Data Source, Table Adapter, Dataset and the Binding Source. These components cause most of the confusion for programmers just starting out with databases. But you don’t have to worry about them at this time. In this video the concentration is primarily learning how to set up a SQL Server database in Visual Studio. The components get used in the next video when we tie our database to a component that allows us to add, edit, delete and save our data.

PDFs: Slides


The DataGridView Control

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The DataGridView control is going to let access our SQL Server database and control the data. This is the video where we learn a little bit about the components that connect our database to our application so that a user can easily work with the data.

In this video we are going to use Microsoft wizards to connect the DataGridView control to our database. In the future we will learn how to use code to directly put our data on the DataGridView control.

You’ll be surprised at how easy this becomes. Oh, there are things that might trip you up. When programming there are always things that will trip you up. But in general, this is a very powerful tool.

PDFs: Slides, Form Code

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