Okay, so how do I explain what the exam was about? We started with a single table of records... well, we had to make the table and the records. Then we set up a data access "program" (well, a library) capable of connecting to, executing commands on, and returning result sets from this database. On top of that, we wrote a business layer, a go-fer that translated between a pure entity class (think "Hi, I’m newStudent, a Student! My name is 'Bob!'") and the database (think database stuff like a name column in a Students table). Finally, on top of all that, there was a desktop application that wrote and saved in pure entity terms, without any idea of what the database was. Architecture!

Oh, and then we built a web service to return the pure entities in XML, a plain-text markup language used for information exchange. This was a lot easier than it sounds. Then we made a quick-and-dirty website to consume this webservice and display these records. Again, fairly easy – if you know what you’re doing.

The instructor released a practice exam with the same specifications, but on a different entity (like, say, Questions instead of Students). So for that reason I don't feel like I'm betraying the system by providing information here. Anyway, I completed the practice exam to its full specifications. And the real thing still took me four-and-a-half hours!

I could have done this project in half the time – or less! – if we'd been allowed to use LINQ to SQL. It can do all the business layer stuff we did manually automatically and reliably. There’s no reason not to use it (for those who might wonder, yes, you can use stored procedures, and it's a snap). LINQ is relatively new, coming to .NET in 2007. (There's also the more complex Entity Framework that can even build a database that fits your application code, but for this it would have been overkill.)

So one of my friends taught me how to do all the database stuff manually. Without him, I would have been up the creek. In the end, I guess it was a pretty decent learning experience, if a bit jarring and last-minute because most of us had never needed to do the translation stuff manually (at least not between SQL Server and a .NET app), except for this exam.

Writing object-relational mapping stuff yourself is becoming the programming equivalent of churning your own butter. So I guess this was a history course.