Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

In your travels as a professional software developer, especially when you come into a new position and need to get used to a new enterprise and its programming - related environment - the tools, the programming style, the existing codebase, etc. you get to observe some of the repetitive coding patterns that people resort to in order to solve their problems. One of the most common ones I've observed is where developers do not have a full understanding of how ADO.NET and connection pooling work. It seems almost like instead of seeking out and using best-practices code and techniques, that some people, either through lack of knowledge or just plain being stubborn, feel compelled to "roll their own" DAL and Database layers. Mistakes and poor design often result. Back around 2001, I found the Microsoft Data Access Application Block ("SqlHelper") class, which quickly solved a whole bunch of data access problems for me, and in fact I still use it today - 5 years later ...