Keyvan Nayyeri

A few minutes ago my newest article entitled How to Write a Provider Model got published on DotNetSlackers.

In this article Keyvan teaches you how to write your own data provider for .NET applications using the provider model.

This is my fourth article on DotNetSlackers about implementing your own data provider model in .NET applications and components.

As I wrote in the article, data provider models have become very common in .NET applications and libraries. Not only .NET, itself, supports various provider models out of the box but also almost all professional .NET applications and components use provider models for their data storage systems.

However, one point that I noticed was, despite the fact that there are tons of resources about custom implementations of default .NET providers in your applications for other storage systems (such as writing an Oracle membership provider for ASP.NET), there isn't a good resource about writing your own provider model in .NET in order to enable such a common functionality in you applications and components. If you can remember, last year I had written another article in providers area on DotNetSlackers about writing a custom web event provider for ASP.NET 2.0. By the way, the number of provider models is growing in .NET world.

Writing a data provider model is a kind of design pattern for .NET applications and can help you so much because of the reasons that I outlined in the introduction section of my article. However, provider models are very common these days and I thought it would be good to write a detailed article on how to implement a provider model in .NET once and foremost.

My new article is the result of this attempt which is a bit longer than normal articles but tries to cover the subject in details in a simple way.

Giving an introduction to the subject and the area of provider models, I wrote about implementing main parts of a provider model. Then after discussing these topics in separate sections and in good details with sample codes, I also implemented a default SQL data provider for the sample provider model and applied it in my own ASP.NET 3.5 web application to show the configuration and usage scenarios.

You can read this article here.