Data Environment Pros and Cons

[shepherd]

Hi -
Recently, a friend of mine was telling me how great the data environment tool in VB is. I've always done this work by hand (ado). Does anyone have any info, or experience on the pros and cons of using the designer instead of coding connections manually? I'm wondering what type of overhead might be involved, etc., but haven't yet found anything addressing this. Thanks!

 

[Guest_imported]

data environment is a mess - avoid it like the plague for anything other than a small application.

You can't control your connections properly, it's completely impossible to organise your queries, it's buggy, etc.

Only use the data environment if you want to do a crappy application that will behave in unexpected ways when you least need it.

If I sound like I've been burnt by it it's because I have..

 

[JonathanC]

Data Environment is very good for tradition client/server applications.

Data Environment strong point is ease of development of database applications using windows forms on a two-tier environment. Obviously you wouldn't use this for multi-tier development.

Moreover, since our ado connection, queries, call to tables and call to stored procedures are defined through data environment, a mere change of your database server's name would require recompile of the entire project.

If possible use initialization files and have class modules that read initialization files to define your database connection.