ADO.NET is an object-oriented set of libraries that allows you to interact with data sources. Commonly, the data source is a data base, but it could also be a text file, an Excel spread sheet, or an XML file. For the purposes of this tutorial, we will look at ADO.NET as a way to interact with a data base. As you are probably aware, there are many different types of data bases available. For example, there is Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, Oracle, Borland Interbase, and IBM DB2, just to name a few.