Can I use .NET (and ADO.NET)for small program development?

Question

Please excuse the newbie question but I would like to develop a small business program for a family business. It's for a childcare center and they really don't like the program they're currently using not to mention the poor support. I'm currently learning C# from some books but I still don't know if there is a small scale database feature available to me without additional cost beyond Visual Studio .NET. I once did a school project with an early version of Access but I may want to market this product if it turns out good and so that is another consideration. I don't know which tools to learn to best produce this program. I would appreciate some guidance before I get too deep in the wrong direction. Thanks.

sabihaerumk · Answer

Yes u can use .NET for ur purpose and infact VS.NET provides excellent tools to do such jobs much more easily than using any other tool or IDE. Moreover u can use ur favourite databases like Access. the only problem is with the OS runnin on ur workstation. ur .NET assemblies cannot work on systems runnin OS such as windows 95 etc. VS.NET can help ur Plannin to release ur product in market through excellent templates for setup.

Andrzej Wegierski · Answer

I must explain my post about Win 9x I think. Some objects or methods ... or properties have a notice doesn't work on Win 98 or something like this. Unfortunately I could find them in Framework 1.1. May be now .NET fully works on Win98 SECOND EDITION?

spgilmore · Answer

Correction it will run on Win98 SECOND EDITION +. I one plans to distribute an application it is best to distribute an embeddable database with it. MSDE may be the only exception to this as it provides extensive (but complicated) MSI installer options. In my opinion there is no better embeddable database than Interbase. It is as powerful as most commercial RDBMSs supports a full featureset is as portable as MSAccess and above all EMBEDDABLE. MSAccess needs to be compacted and reaired periodically. MSSQL and MSDE need indexes rebuilt and UPDATE STATISTICS once in a while. Interbase will run for years when nobody even knows it's there. Version 6.0 was at one time released to the public domain. It was still recently available and Firebird is built off the the open source. I haven't used Firebird but it's still embeddable still free and has a native .NET data provider. The downside is that there is a learning curve to use it. It has a funny SQL dialect.

kovan · Answer

you can use access as your backend database even with .NET but you should look into MSDE very nice and very powerful and free its from microsoft correction to wegierski's post .NET will run on win98+ so your pretty safe with that you could also youse MySQL but i would use MSDE very powerful and very nice my 2 cents

Andrzej Wegierski · Answer

It's possible I think. You could use free databases as MySQL text files or free version of MSSQL. Advanteges: .net is a good new technology. Disadvantages: it can't work under old operating systems as Win9x or on old computers often used in family business.