Glossary

Chapter 1

ADO.Net

A Microsoft data-access programming interface technology shipped as part of the Microsoft .NET base class libraries. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADO.NET for more details.

C#

Pronounced “cee sharp,” C# is a managed programming language released as part of Microsoft’s .NET Framework. C# is an object-oriented language and draws inspiration from C++, Delphi, and Java. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_(programming_language) for more details.

delegate

Can be thought of as a typed-safe reference to a method. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegate_(.NET) for more details.

Domain Specific Language (DSL)

A domain-specific language is a programming language specific to an individual problem domain. Conversely, C# and VB.NET are general programming languages that can solve a range of programming tasks. Usually DSLs focus specifically on a single technique or, in this particular usage, a particular data query language. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language for more details.

Microsoft .NET Framework

A managed runtime environment for Windows (Linux flavors via the Mono framework). Consists of a runtime environment for executing applications, a set of programming languages to write those applications, and a set of base-class libraries. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework for more details.

Microsoft SQL Server

Commonly just referred to as SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database system product by Microsoft. It is programmed in its own query language called Transact Structured Query Language (T-SQL). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SQL_Server for more details.

Transact SQL (T-SQL)

Microsoft SQL Server’s built-in query language based on ANSI SQL. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transact-SQL for more details.

Visual Basic.Net

Often referred to as VB.NET, Visual Basic.NET is an object-oriented managed language for the Microsoft .NET Framework. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VB.Net for more information.

XPath

XML Path Language is a specific domain language for selecting and navigating segments of an XML document. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPath for more details.

XQuery

XQuery is a language designed for querying XML-based data. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XQuery for more details.

Chapter 2

intellisense

Visual Studio has a set of features that show dynamic help tips as you type code. These tips take many forms based on the code you are editing at that time. One example is that after typing the name of an instance variable followed by a period character (.), Visual Studio will pop up a small tip balloon showing what fields, properties, or method are available on the object being typed at that time.