I am slowly getting back into the swing of things. Today was my first chance in a couple of weeks to get back into the MSDN Forums.
One of my favorite subjects came up today, GetSchema, which I have talked about a number of times. GetSchema is one of those great new features in ADO.NET 2.0 to help with pulling metadata and information from a database. You can use it generically with DbProviderFactories and DbConnection to work against any .NET Managed Database Provider. Below is an example using GetSchema to get a list of tables from the Northwind Database:
DbProviderFactory factory =
DbProviderFactories.GetFactory("System.Data.SqlClient");
DataTable tables = null;
using (DbConnection connection = factory.CreateConnection())
{
connection.ConnectionString = "Data Source=(local);
Initial Catalog=Northwind;Integrated Security=True";
string[] restrictions = new string[4];
// Catalog
restrictions[0] = "Northwind";
// Owner
restrictions[1] = "dbo";
// Table - We want all, so null
restrictions[2] = null;
// Table Type - Only tables and not views
restrictions[3] = "BASE TABLE";
connection.Open();
// Here is my list of tables
tables = connection.GetSchema("Tables", restrictions);
}
Pretty simple stuff once you get used to it.
Source: David Hayden ( .NET Developer )
ADO.NET 2.0 Tutorials