In an earlier article (Implementing ODBC in ASP .NET), we described some issues with Microsoft's ODBC server controls, and how to work through them. In a nutshell, although Microsoft provided the necessary data objects, they left out the logic required to wire these objects into .NET's new XML-based Dataset standard. Our article described how to perform this task manually.

Although our approach works nicely, it requires a fair amount of code, particularly for Datasets with many fields. In addition, change control can rapidly become a problem if several Web Forms must access the same Dataset, since any structural change to the Dataset (adding or removing a field, etc.) must be reflected in each Data Adapter's table mappings.