Get It Done With MySQL 5&Up, Chapter 15. Copyright © Peter Brawley & Arthur Fuller 2020.

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Using .NET with MySQL

.NET architecture .NET and MySQL Connecting from Visual Studio ODBC.NET
Starter C# ODBC application ODBC Master-detail window Native .NET drivers
ASP.NET Model ASP.NET development Visual Studio as a MySQL maintenance tool

Why .NET?
.NET is a big, continuously evolving bundle of old and new Microsoft development
technologies. It continues to be used less with MySQL than, say, PHP, but in the world at
large it’s had more than 2 billion installations. Over six million developers use it.
Microsoft’s decision to make the technology open source and add cross-platform capa-
bilities has widened use. Version 4.8 wants a 2GHz processor or better, at least 0.5GB
RAM; 4.5GB disk space. Windows version requirements are summarised here. Main
.NET components you will need include the core downloadable here, the framework
downloadable here, and the deployment guide.downloadable here. Names and contents
of packages vary from version to version, over the years have included…
• the core, .NET Framework, implements HTTP, XML, SOAP (Simple Object
Access Protocol), DDEX (Data Designer Extensibility) and UDDI (Universal
Description Discovery and Integration). Multiple versions advance frequently;
• data handling classes bundled as ADO.NET (ActiveX Data Objects);
• Internet Information Services (IIS);
• a Common Language Runtime (CLR), a virtual machine for executing code
compiled from various languages (analogous, and not accidentally, to the Java
Virtual Machine);
• ODBC.NET, a wrapper for ODBC drivers;
• Microsoft SQL Server;
• ASP.NET (Active Server Pages .NET) for developing web applications using
VBScript, JScript, Perlscript, Python, Visual Basic, C#, C, Cobol, and even Lisp
or Smalltalk;
• Visual Basic .NET;
• Visual Studio: an elegant application development environment incorporating all
the above, with a new free Community edition and commercial versions costing
up to $12,000 US;
• Visual Studio Code, a code editor, successor to the now discontinued Web Matrix;
• Visual Basic, C#, C++, J++, WebDeveloper and Visual Studio Community
(formerly Express) Editions.

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.NET supports true O-O programming with inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation. It
offers tremendous language flexibility, debugging support, and multi-level authenti-
cation—a must for multi-tiered web applications. Since .NET is available for virtually
any device that can reach the internet, it’s atrractive for developing leasable on-demand
software. To browse options see www.microsoft.com/net. All that power, convenience,
flexibility and robustness are strong reasons to consider developing in .NET.
Until late 2014, if you wanted the full-fledged Visual Studio .NET development
environment, you found that Visual Studio .NET would cost you $500 to $12,000 US
depending on the package, and the total cost of ownership, including add-ins and
necessary updates, would run beyond the affordable range of many a small organisation.
Microsoft’s November 2014 release of Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition changed
all that. Now most of what you need is free. Middleware that connects .NET to MySQL
databases (Connector/NET from MySQL) is free too. Visual Studio .NET Community
edition is free for …
• any individual developer working on a commercial or non-commercial project,
• any developer contributing to an open source project,
• anyone (student, teacher, classroom, online course) in an academic research or
course setting,
• any non-enterprise organisation with 5 or fewer developers working together on a
commercial or non-commercial project.
.NET Framework core has been open source now for several years, and has been ported
to Linux and OSX. An indicator of how far Microsoft has come in a short period of time:
the Visual Studio code editor is built on Chromium, the open source version of the
Google Chrome web browser, using the open source Electron framework, hosted on
GitHub!

But …
That flexibility, robustness and marketing will cost you computing power, efficiency,
freedom, modularity, installation issues and security
About the computing power: It runs in .5G but serious use requires a fast processor and
several GB of RAM. The more computing power you throw at Visual Studio, the happier
you will be.
About efficiency: The magic of .NET database interoperability comes from an XML layer
between code and data source. That mapping costs you CPU cycles, memory and time.
So does the huge .NET class hierarchy. ASP and ODBC impose additional length on
code paths, are memory-hungry, and execute slowly—serious problems for web
applications and their servers.
And if you are considering ODBC, there is the double-edged question of database
independence. If application code is free of specifics tying it to a particular RDBMS, the
database backend can be swapped out like a battery in a car. Isn't that a terrific
advantage? Yes and no. Yes to the extent that the application's SQL scripts are limited to
entirely portable, vanilla code. No to a similar extent, since the degree to which the SQL
code is generic is the degree to which the code fails to take advantage of optimisations

Using .NET with MySQL Page 337

available in a specific RDBMS. Database independence is good for portability. Database
dependence is good for performance.
About modularity and installation issues: Windows products are designed to work
together and sell one another, and since early in the history of Windows have been
designed more for corporate environments because that’s where the big software buying
dollars are. Two big priorities in Windows development have been security and integr-
ation, both of which impose deep interdependencies, so most Windows components you
acquire, including those that are freely downloadable, have wide and deep installation
and runtime contingencies and dependencies. The more you work in Windows, the more
likely it is that some component you’re trying to install or use is out of sync with some
other functionality you previously installed and still need.
Yes the problem isn’t unique to Windows—the more complex a system, the more
pervasive such issues are. Decentralised open source development, though, as in Linux,
has many advantages in this regard. With Visual Studio.NET this problem may be worse
than with other Microsoft software. If you work independently or in a small shop, the
costs in time and money imposed by these interdependencies can be big enough to make
source alternatives to Visual Studio, and to .NET itself, look comparatively attractive.
About freedom and security: Those modularity issues have a lot to do with the suscepti-
bility of Windows to viruses, worms, hacks and trojans. ASP.NET officially requires that
you deploy on Microsoft's IIS, which is infamous enough for security vulnerabilities to
inspire a steady march away from it, especially to PHP and Apache. Whether IIS vulnera-
bilities are due more to Windows architecture, bad code or to hacker preferences, the
problems are serious, they continue, and they cost you time and money.
You may be able to use .NET and sidestep IIS. Covalent Technologies discontinued its
Apache web server that supported ASP.NET, but you can run a website on Apache and
relay requests to IIS running internally on another machine. Or you can switch to
Linux/UNIX and develop ASP.NET applications using Novell's Mono.
Table 15-1: Apache/PHP or .NET?
Apache/PHP .NET
Price of core elements zero zero
Price of development tools zero Zero for Community ed.
OOP weak strong
Open-source yes no
Development GUI good (3rd party) excellent
Rich UI data controls none many
Support, bug fixes free, quick Well, it’s Microsoft
Speed good fair
Efficiency good poor
Security good good
Vulnerability small large
Exception management since PHP 5 yes
The choice between PHP/Apache and .NET is a matrix (Table 15-1). .NET is extremely
powerful and versatile. It is rigorously O-O, designed with the enterpise in mind, sup-
ported by the biggest software company on the planet, and here to stay. The Visual

Using .NET with MySQL Page 338

Studio IDE is spectacularly good. Total cost of PHP/Apache ownership is much lower,
though, because full-featured downloads are free, upgrades are free, many add-ins are
free or nearly so, help is free from a huge responsive user community. No open-source
development company will charge you money to report a bug, and the PHP and Apache
open-source development groups are very good at correcting bugs quickly. PHP and
Apache run on every platform you are likely to work on or port to. Which line items in
the matrix weigh most heavily in your situation will determine whether .NET should be
your choice.

.NET architecture
Windows and Java are the two most popular programming environments on the planet.
Java enjoys three advantages: it is object-oriented bottom to top, it manages code to
prevent dangling pointers and similar errors, and it runs on any machine that runs a Java
Virtual Machine (JVM), regardless of operating system.
.NET is a Microsoft response to Java, meant to provide for Windows what Java provides
for a Java-enabled operating system, plus language neutrality—you do not need to learn
one particular language, and you should be able to port much Windows code to .NET
without a lot of rewrites.
.NET Framework interfaces inherit multiply, its objects inherit singly. There is support
for events and properties. A fundamental concept is the namespace—a collection of
classes, interfaces, enumerations, and delegates. The root object is System.Object. The
Common Type System (CTS) defines basic value types, type composition and safety,
classes, interfaces and delegation. The Common Language Specification (CLS) is a
subset of CTS with which .NET languages comply. Microsoft has promised that all future
APIs will comply with CLS.
The Common Intermediate Language (CIL) is the intermediate code to which all .NET
languages compile in executables called assemblies, which are DLLs or EXEs having a
header that indicates the presence of CIL code and .NET metadata. The Common
Language Runtime (CLR), written in C++, includes the CTS, the garbage collector,
exception handlers, and a module which just-in-time-compiles assembly CIL byte codes
to native object code.
The Framework Class Library (FCL) is the .NET runtime library. No more Win32 API,
which no-one will miss. Of particular interest to MySQL developers are .NET
Framework database and .NET web classes. Database classes inherit from System.Data
and implement ADO.NET. There are three DataProvider groups: System.Data.Odbc,
System.Data.OleDb, and direct data providers. Web classes inherit from System.Web,
and implement ASP.NET.
For database applications, data modelling in the development tool is crucial. The core
.NET data model is in the System.Data namespace, structuring classes for data source
connection, query submission, data manipulation, and result processing. It serves as a
hierarchical data cache, serviceable online and offline.

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A DataSource may be a database, an XML file, or any other data store for which the
.NET data interface has been implemented. Out of the box, .NET implements these
interfaces as managed DataProviders for Microsoft SQL Server, OLE DB, Oracle, and
ODBC. So out of the box, you can use .NET with MySQL via ODBC once you install
MySQL's Connector/ODBC (Chapter 11). MySQL does not support Ole DB, but
publishes the native managed MySQL DataProvider Connector/NET for all versions of
.NET Framework.

Fig 15-1: Core data interfaces in .NET

To connect to a database, you need a Connection object for that database. For SQL
Server there is the built-in System.Data.SQLClient.SQLConnection namespace, for
MySQL the namespace specified by the provider, for example System.Data.MySQL.
MySQLConnection. In each case you tailor a Command object to specify connection
parameters. A subclassed DataAdapter serves as a helper object linking Command and
DataSet objects.
The DataSet object is a memory-resident store for data tables, their relationships, their
constraints, and of course their data. It provides a consistent relational programming
model that is independent of the data source. It represents its data as a set of DataTables,
which can be defined to exactly mirror underlying database tables, or to combine them in
whatever way is desired. It can also be customised, by way of an XSD schema, into a
typed DataSet.
The data stored in the DataSet object is asynchronous with its underlying database.
Changes are cached. To decide whether there are changes, canvass DataSet.
HasChanges().To send changes back to the database, pass the entire object to the middle
tier server, or call DataSet.GetChanges() to extract modified rows from a DataSet so only
changed rows are sent back.

.NET and MySQL

To develop MySQL-enabled .NET applications, you need several bits and pieces of
software, starting with a current version of the .NET Framework, downloadable here. For
early .NET releases you also needed a current version of Microsoft Data Access
(MDAC); in more recent releases, this fnctionality is bundled in. For big projects or team
development, you will want the Visual Studio IDE.

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On the MySQL side, two methods for connecting .NET applications to MySQL databases
are supported: ODBC.NET, and native .NET providers: So you need one or both of …
Connector/ODBC (Chapter 3, Chapter 11)if you wish to connect to MySQL from
Visual Studio via ODBC.NET, or if you wish your application to use ODBC;
Connector/.NET: How MySQL, .NET and Visual Studio versions match up is laid out in
the Connector/NET manual installation chapter. Connector/NET version 7.0.introduced
support for more recent Visual Studio versions, and for the X DevAPI (see MySQL shell
and document engine, Chapter 3). MySQL 8.0 requires Connector/NET 8.0.
Use the MySQL all-in-one installer to install MySQL Server, Connectors, Workbench,
Notifier, and MySQL for Excel and Visual Studio all at once.
If you plan to use ODBC, read on, otherwise jump to Native .NET Provider.

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