Introduction

In the case study presented in this chapter, we take both of our previous case studies and use what we ve learned together to form a big project. We ll be calling this our dotBoard! This case study will detail the process necessary to design and implement your own message board using ADO.NET and a bit of XML. First, we will go through the process necessary to create the data structures in MS Access and SQL Server. We will analyze our application and break down the data into small pieces in order to represent them in a database. Next, we will determine the best way to design our application and go through the design of all the classes we will use to power the message board, and determine what methods and properties each class should contain.

Once the data analysis is done, we are going to develop our classes that will represent the core business objects in our application. These objects will be the guts of dotBoard and are what we will use in our User Interface to allow our users to interact indirectly with the data in our database. The last step we will perform is creating the User Interface itself and allow users to interact with our message board.

One major point we should realize, however, is that no matter how large a project this message board seems, it is in fact incredibly simple once broken down into its smaller pieces. In fact, as you delve deeper and deeper...