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Question: where does ADO.NET sit in the MDAC stack? Do Microsoft consider it part of MDAC at all? The MDAC roadmap does mention it, but doesn't state whether it is part of the .NET framework or whether it is part of the MDAC framework. I know that ADO.NET must use a .NET Managed provider, but these just appear to be a simplified version of an OLE DB provider, even though they don't use COM and instead use the .NET CLR. Can anyone give me an answer to this? I'd like to update the MDAC article. - 203.134.166.99 08:07, 20 September 2005 (UTC)[reply]

MDAC must be installed on the client machine in order to use ADO.NET; what version depends on what .NET version and classes you use. My understaning is that ADO.NET is essentially a lot of clever interop to make use of low-level OLE DB drivers within MDAC. DigitalEnthusiast 19:50, 13 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think there's too much emphasis on DataSets in this article. To call them half of ADO.NET is silly. While they certainly were the darling of .NET 1.0, there are a great many programmers who never use them, due to overhead reasons. Obviously many of these are web application programmers, who use a DataReader instead, and simply output the data row-by-row in html format, but there are many others who use a DataReader ( or, sometimes, a DataTable, but this isn't a best practice ) to populate a list of custom classes for other parts of the application to consume. Internally, a DataSet uses a DataReader ( or a series of them ) to populate DataTables, reading all the records from the query result set, and storing them in memory. When this is consumed, that makes two passes over every record, plus an aweful lot of memory use. Therefore, it's very common not to use them in situations that don't require an updatable, in-memory cache that provides the wealth of services found in a DataSet. So, many programmers use ADO.NET but not DataSets, so I think they get more emphasis than they deserve in this article. DigitalEnthusiast 19:57, 13 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is there a citation for the given expansion of ADO ("ActiveX Data Objects")? This is different from the expansion I've always heard in the past ("Active Data Objects"), which is also more logical as this technology is not part of ActiveX. 212.159.69.4 (talk) 19:09, 16 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]