ADO is so rich, powerful, and flexible that I decided to devote two chapters to it. Chapter 13 contains an in-depth description of its objects and their properties, methods, and events. In this chapter, I show you how to put in practice those concepts and also how to work around a few ADO quirks that could make your programming efforts harder than strictly necessary.
A preliminary note: ADO is an evolving technology, and the good news is that Microsoft is committed to continuously improving it. It's therefore possible that a few problems I encountered will have been resolved by the time you read these pages. Moreover, ADO behavior is heavily affected by the underlying OLE DB provider, so many problems can depend on which database you're connecting to and can also disappear if you install a more recent version of the provider. When possible, I tried the code with several providers, but I surely couldn't test all the possible combinations. Take this into account when you test the code I show you in this chapter.