Sams Teach Yourself .Net in 21 Days

By Jason Beres

• Table of Contents
  • Copyright
  • About the Author
  • About the Technical Editor
  • Acknowledgments
  • We Want to Hear from You
  • Introduction
  • Week 1: At a Glance
  • Day 1. Introduction to the Microsoft .NET Framework
  • Day 2. Introduction to Visual Studio .NET
  • Day 3. Writing Windows Forms Applications
  • Day 4. Deploying Windows Forms Applications
  • Day 5. Writing ASP.NET Applications
  • Day 6. Deploying ASP.NET Applications
  • Day 7. Exceptions, Debugging, and Tracing
  • Week 1. In Review
  • Week 2: At a Glance
  • Day 8. Core Language Concepts in Visual Basic .NET and C#
  • Day 9. Using Namespaces in .NET
  • Day 10. Accessing Data with ADO.NET
  • Day 11. Understanding Visual Database Tools
  • Day 12. Accessing XML in .NET
  • Day 13. XML Web Services in .NET
  • Day 14. Components and .NET
  • Week 2. In Review
  • Week 3: At a Glance
  • Day 15. Writing International Applications
  • Day 16. Using Macros in Visual Studio .NET
  • Day 17. Automating Visual Studio .NET
  • Day 18. Using Crystal Reports
  • Day 19. Understanding Microsoft Application Center Test
  • Day 20. Using Visual SourceSafe
  • Day 21. Object Role Modeling with Visio
    • Introducing Object Role Modeling
    • Using Visio to Create an ORM Model
    • Adding ORM Facts to the Data Model
    • Creating a Database Diagram from the Conceptual Model
    • Summary
    • Q&A
    • Quiz
    • Exercises
  • Week 3. In Review

Q&A

1. ORM is cool, but it seems like overkill. I'm a consultant, and this is a lot of work to go through each time I start a new project. Is it really necessary?

   That's a good point. Using ORM models to define a conceptual data model before you create a physical model is completely up to you. The nice thing about doing a conceptual model first is that it can help you really understand what needs to happen with the project. By interviewing the users of the system you're building and taking the information they give you and plugging it into a data model, you're actually building the physical database at the same time. Also, after the model is in the database, you can update Visio and then update the database using Visio, so you're actually creating a nice audit of everything you're doing. It isn't a bad practice to get into, but I think you must be disciplined if you decide to do it.

2. I'm trying to reverse-engineer a database in Visio as you suggested. But I keep running into problems after I create the data source and try to run the reverse-engineering process. Why?

3. When reverse-engineering a database, make sure that you set up the correct Visio database drivers by selecting the Drivers menu item from the Tools, Options menu. This must be set up in conjunction with the OBDC data source you're reverse-engineering.

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