Hi,
a quick overview to get you started. (Just use some keywords in google together with "tutorial" or "introduction" to get more information! Or ask for more details if you need help finding some good tutorials or introductions.)
The part of the .Net Framework which is repsonsible for data access is called ADO.Net. It includes a wide range of classes including:
- Core database access. The core classes are DbConnection and DbCommand (or better - derived from these)
- DataSet/DataTable - these classes provide an offline storage of data. Together with DataAdapters you can easily read data to these classes and write changes back.
- enhanced things like EntityFramework, Linq, ... feek free to read about that but I would concentrate on the other stuff first.
To acces an access database, the classes you should look up are OleDbConnection and OleDbCommand:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.data.oledb.oledbconnection.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.data.oledb.oledbcommand.aspx
The description of the classes provide examples, but it might be hard to get a working connection string. The following url might be usefull:
http://www.connectionstrings.com/access
With this you can do a first start and do SQL Commands on your access database. If you do not know SQL so far, then you should read some SQL tutorial.
If you got that working, you could check out the second technology: Read data into a DataSet, change it there and then write it back. The big advantage is, that you can easily bind controls to data inside a DataSet or DataTable so you need almost no code
for the UI stuff. (So the user can change existing data, add new data or delete records. All that is required is something like a save button that writes changes to the database (which can be easily done with the adapter, too).
But that 2nd step is really the 2nd step. Start with the other stuff first (which is also required when using data adapters/tables/sets.
With kind regards,
Konrad
