Hi, my name is Mark Ashton.  I currently maintain and develop System.Data.DataSet, its related components and some new features for an upcoming version of ADO.Net.  In the past, I helped develop and maintain the .Net Framework Data Providers; before that was Visual InterDev 1.0 & 6.0.

What I hope to achieve with this blog is to help supplement .Net Framework Data documentation, give more detail and background to issues that we repeatedly encounter from community feedback (mostly relating to the DataSet) and occasionally to address other random topics.

I do know a lot about System.Data, but not so much about the wrappers around that technology.  For example, Typed DataSets, TableAdapter, DataGrid, DataGridView or ASP.Net  DataSourceControl.

Some existing documentation that I’m aware of and managed to list here:

            MSDN Data Access and Storage Developer Center

            MSDN System.Data Namespace

            Data Access blog

The MSDN newsgroup “Discussions in dotnet.framework.adonet” or MSDN forum “.NET Framework Data Access and Storage” are good places to ask questions.  I do occasionally read and post answers to questions.

Friends with known active blogs that I work with are:

http://blogs.msdn.com/aconrad/default.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/angelsb/default.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/cperry/default.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/timmall/default.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/brianbec/