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Microsoft Windows was created to solve various kinds of
computer problems. Text or word processing was taken care of easily as it
can be performed using WordPad, an application that ships with every
installation of the operating system. All regular calculations were also
taken care of as can be verified in Calculator, an application that also
ships with MS Window. Basic drawing and graphics can be performed using Paint, another
application that is installed with MS Windows. To
support databases in MS Windows, Microsoft created a library called ActiveX Data
Objects or ADO. ADO was meant to create, administer, and manipulate
databases. To use ADO, you had to first create a database using an
application such as Microsoft Access or by other related means. Because
this only partly solved the problem, and because this almost restricted
people to use Microsoft Access, there was need for additional solutions.
Among the limitations of ADO, there was security and even the ability to
create a database without necessarily using a product from Microsoft. To
address these issues, Microsoft created an additional library called
Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects Extensions for Data Definition Language and Security,
abbreviated ADOX. Nowadays, Microsoft has made free everything you need to
create, manage, and even distribute databases (in fact, at this time,
except for the operating systems, Microsoft has developed various
libraries and compilers and made them completely free so that you can
create any type of application without spending money: you only need time
to use them). |
Although treated as one entity, Microsoft ActiveX Data
Object is really many libraries grouped under one name. For the rest of
our lessons, ADO will be used to refer to all the technologies we need to
create and administer our databases. We will point the differences only
when needed.
ADO is only a library, that is, a series of files that
provide "drivers" and documentation to perform a task. In order to
use ADO, you need a programming or development environment in which you
can write code. The environment you use should/must also be able to
"understand" your code, analyze it and produce a result. This is
not an anomaly of ADO. All libraries work like that. There are many
environments you can use with ADO. Some of them are Microsoft Internet
Explorer (using scripting languages such as VBScript or JavaScript), Borland Delphi, Microsoft Visual C++, Visual InterDev, Borland C++
Builder, Microsoft Visual Studio. NET, just to name a few.
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When writing the exercises on this site, we had to
decide and choose among various available options, unfortunately.
Different programming environments offer different advantages and
disadvantages. On this site, we will create all of our databases using
Microsoft Visual Basic 6. We chose it because at the time of this writing,
we found out that many people are still using it. Of course, Microsoft
Access would offer the same flexibility but we preferred this because MS
Access is already a complete database environment in its own right. |
In order to follow the lessons on this site, you are
supposed to have some knowledge of Microsoft
Visual Basic as it is the main language of ADO. The topics you are:
- Variables
- Procedures and Functions
- Objects and Methods of Objects
- Conditional Statements
It would be a big waste of time to try to teach both
MSVB (which is a language or a programming environment) and ADO (which is
a library).
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