This article has been excerpted from the book "A Programmer's Guide to ADO.NET in C#".
As you can see, working with different data sources means nothing except changing the connection string. Listing 5-27 shows the connection string for the MySQL database. You access a MySQL database through odbc data providers. (I'll discuss My SQL database connectivity and show how to install an ODBC driver for MySQL with a step-by-step example later article). As you can see from Listing 5-27, you can use a similar database as Northwind. To provide a similar sample, I exported the Access 2000 Northwind database as a MySQL database. You can use any database. Just replace the database name and change the SQL statement. To test this application, create a Windows application, drop a data grid to the form, add a reference to the System.Data and Microsoft.Data.Odbc namespaces, and type the following code in Listing 5-27 on the Form_load event.
Listing 5-27. Reading data from a MySQL database using ODBC