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Dataset Designer functionality in Asp.Net

I am developing an Asp.Net WebForms website. I am used from my prior project to the "dataset designer", it was my main worksite, I had there all my tables and also hundreds of queries which I could easily call from code like this: "this.InventoryTableAdapter.MyQuery('parameters'), it was great, but I can't find such a thing in Asp.Net, am I missing something. how do you access your special queries in code. do you have to write cumbersome ADO.Net code for each small thing, can someone enlighten me please.

You can still add a database designer to your .NET application. Today's standard ORM for .NET is Entity Framework, although many other good options exist. One thing to research is Entity Framework Database First. Here's how to get started...
In your project, choose to Add New Item. In the Add New Item dialog choose the Data items and then select ADO.NET Entity Data Model. Click Add.
In the Entity Data Model Wizard, select EF Designer from database.
If you have database connections defined within your development environment, you may see one of these connections pre-selected. Or, you can create a new connection to your database.
After setting up your connection, select the tables you want to generate models for. These will be the tables available in your database designer.
This is a very high level how to. You can read more about this approach here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/mvc/overview/getting-started/database-first-development/creating-the-web-application
Another ORM option is LinqToSql. You can read more about creating a database designer ".dbml" file using LinqToSql here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb384428.aspx
I hope this helps.

C# Is there an easier way to create a database, empty tables, tables with data in them by default, stored procs and views?

Before I posted this question, I did some Googling first on how a database was created through C# and mostly it points to either SMO or SQL query files and it was the time of SQL Server 2005 and 2008.
So at this day in age, is there an easier way to create a database with empty tables, tables with data in them by default, stored procedures and views?
I need a suggestion.

I think the answer is probably Entity Framework. You can do 'code first' and use database migrations, allowing you to write your C# code and use that to generate a lot of the database for you.
Ultimately though, 'easier' is subjective. I personally find EF great for the 'normal' stuff, but at the end of the day, if you need a stored procedure to do some custom logic; you need to write the custom logic, in some fashion.
Maybe have a look and see if you think it fits your needs.
https://www.asp.net/mvc/overview/getting-started/getting-started-with-ef-using-mvc/creating-an-entity-framework-data-model-for-an-asp-net-mvc-application

Looked at the database projects in studio 2013. You create a database as a series of scripts using a familiar GUI. However, changes are published - this process creates a unique change script targeting the connection you define. For new databases the whole thing gets created, but publish against a partial or out dated version and the script created in a change script to bring it up to date.
You can even writ unit tests against your database using specialist tools, although I do find them lacking a bit.
More on msdn - here

Depends. right out of gates. Sp and views. Best shot is directly from database through a workbench. I can then capture definitions and store in a file to be replayed through c#
As for tables there are many orms that can generate tables via c#. Look at entity frameworks. Code first examples
I have generated tables using EF Works fine. I then went into database and created views and sps.
The trick is to migrate new views and sps into your EF model U can google entity Frameworks code first ... Adding views and SPs.
Worst case is u create database all through database workbench. Create a script that an be played to recreate eveything. By running. Then use EF DATABASE first approach
In either case u end up with a good set of autogenerated code to manage CRUD and object management and an abstracted data model

DataSet or Entity Data Model

Please excuse the noob question as I am new to integrating data with my applications. I've tried to find answers on the net, but not there yet.
I have an application I'm developing in C# on VS2010 which requires data in/out from a database. I am trying to figure out if its a DataSet or Entity Data Model I need to use when setting up a data source. My understanding was that it was the EDM which allowed me to treat tables/fields in a database as objects, but somehow it looks like I can do that with a DataSet too.
Some sources explain that a DataSet makes a cached copy of the Database which can then be manipulated.
Essentially my question is which should I use and what are the (dis)advantages of one over the other.

You have several options open to you when it comes to storing and retrieving data to/from a database:
At the very simplest level, use ADO.NET to open a connection to the DB, create a command and execute it. If you expect results back (i.e. SELECT ...) then you could call the command's ExecuteReader(...). Working in this manner results in very quick execution and the minimum of overhead, but you have to do more of the heavy lifting. If your app is simple, this is probably a good way to go. If your app is, or is likely to be more complex, you may want to consider other options...
ADO.NET DataSets are a reasonable DB IO mechanism, particularly for reading data from a DB. However, they can be a little cumbersome when trying to update the DB.
You could use an Object-Relational Mapper (ORM) like nHibernate or Entity Framework, but, frankly, that often results in your learning curve increasing dramatically while you figure out how to plug together the moving parts and make them work well together.
You might also consider a new variant of Entity Framework called Code First (CF): This allows you to pretty much design your code and CF will generate your EDM and handle the majority of the DB operations required for you to build your system. Scott Hanselman wrote up a nice intro into EF CF.
Having used practically every DB API and ORM on Windows over the last 20+ years, I am delighted with how CF is shaping up! EF 4.3 that shipped just a couple of weeks ago includes some key new improvements to CF including migrations which allow you to handle changes to your DB schema as it evolves. I've build 3-4 systems using EF CF over the last couple of months and am very happy - it's my favorite relational database IO mechanism at present.
If you want to really get into EF CF, I strongly recommend Julia Lerman's book EF CF - it's a short, nicely written, very useful guide that should take you no more than a day or two to work through the main sections of.
Hope this helps.

If you add a LocalDB data source to your project (because you want a small local database file) then when the Data Source Configuration Wizard pops up, it explicitly asks you whether you want to use a Dataset or Entity Data Model database model. Is this the situation you were facing? That was the problem I had that brought me to this entry.
There is no question that for an enterprise class application, or a website, you would want to investigate ADO.NET or an ORM, but it doesn't help answer this question, which has to do with what are the differences between choosing Dataset vs Entity Data Model in the wizard.
Essentially, Entity Data Model is the more recent technology. If you are unfamiliar with Dataset, then this is probably not the time to start using it.

If you're asking what are the pros and cons for ADO.NET (DataSet) vs EntityFramework (Entity Data Model) then there is a discussion that may help at ADO.NET Entity Framework or ADO.NET
EF will get you up and running pretty quickly but in my (very limited) experience its been a pain to maintain.
What is it that has determined that these are your only two options? There are far more available to you including many ORMs.

If your application is supporting a business application than queries get complex pretty soon. In such scenario, stored-procedures save a lot of time and are much easier to maintain and they work better with ADO.NET. In almost all scenarios, I would suggest using stored-procedures and ADO.NET. Move as much of the business rules and logic to stored procedures as you can...much easier to maintain this way.
Use Datasets (datatables) only to retrieve and read data. Any data that needs to be saved to database should be directly manipulated in the database ... no point doing it in dataset and then saving the same. In a multi-user environment it is almost always better to save the changes to database as soon as the user has clicked "save".
You may (should) use business objects within the application for business-logic processes.
Let us take a simple example of where you are saving a Contact (name, phone, email, address etc) and then retrieving a list of contacts added today...I would suggest you do it as follows:
1) Adding the contact - Client (web or otherwise) collects data --> data is saved in a Contact business object --> validate Contact object --> Call repository layer to save Contact object (adding a repository layer is useful but not-necessary to keep the data layer abstract from the client) --> Repository calls the data layer to save the contact object (here a simple ADO.NET call, using Command object, can be made to call the stored procedure to save the contact in database). No dataset was used in this use case.
2) Retrieving list of contacts -- Client calls the repository layer to get the list of contacts --> repository layer call the data layer to retrieve the data --> here the list of data is retrieved as a dataset(datatable) --> return the datatable back to the client and let the client read the data directly from datatable while rendering the data. Even a single contact can be retrieved as a dataset.
P.S: ORM is almost always an overkill. It is almost always used because certain developers like to keep everything object-oriented...so an extra layer gets added even though it does nothing useful (IMHO).

But, what if you have business logic (stored procedures) which can be used in many different applications.
So depends: if you make your application for different users with different backend storage, or you make many applications for users which doesn't change backend storage so often.
It is very important to have database integrity and rules independent from application (inner or outsource)

Dynamic N-Layer with ASP.NET

I'm trying to build a web application that let the administrator talk to the database through C# and add new tables and columns to fit his requirements (sort of a very simple database studio) but I'm not trying to just create some spaghetti application.
So I'm trying to figure out how to let those things dynamically (automatically) when he creates a table and use the table to build them :
1- The business objects or entities (the classes, it's objects and properties).
2- The Data access layer (some simple methods that connects to the database and add, update, delete retrieve items (objects)).
Is this possible ? any pointers on how to achieve it ?
EDIT
just opened your link!! .. it's talking about the data bound controls and stuff! .. my question is way more advanced than that!.
when you build an N-Layered application you start with the database schema and implementation and it's easy to do programtically then you start building the DAL classes which (add, edit, etc in other words the CRUD operations) in and form this database
what I want to do is to allow the web administrator to choose add the new table through my application and then -dynamically- the application would take the tables names and columns as parameters and create new classes and define within them the CRUD methods that will implement the SQL CRUD operations
then it would also create dynamically the classes and define within them the variables, properties and methods to call and use the DAL methods .. all this based on the table, column names
NOTE : All this happens on the run-time!

You might want to look into ASP.Net Dynamic Data. It's a RAD tool which very easily gives you CRUD functionality for your entities and more. Check it out.

Sometime back I had also asked similar question on SO. I got only one reply.
Today I was digging some information on MSDN and as I had guessed it, MS CRM entity model works based on metadata. So basically whatever a CRM developer is working against is just metadata, they are not real objects as such. Following is the MSDN link.
Extend MS CRM Metadata and here is the MS CRM 4.0 SDK.
I hope this should get you started.
Update: Recently hit upon Visual Studio LightSwitch. I think this is what we wanted to build. A UI which will pick up table information from DB and then create all CRUD screens. VS LightSwitch is in its Beta1 and has quite a lot of potential. Should be a nice starting point.

First, any man trying to create MS Access is doomed to recreate MS Access. Badly.
You are better off using ASP.NET Dynamic Data (as suggested) or ASP.NET MVC Scaffolding. But runtime-generated playforms that actually make decent applications are really pipe dreams. You will need developer time to do anything complex. Or well.

What you are asking is non-sense. Why? Because the idea behind BLL and n-tier is that you know your data model well, and can create a static class model to represent your data model.
If your data model is dynamic, and changing, then you cannot create a static BLL (which is what a BLL is). What you will have to do dynamically build your queries at run-time. This is not something that any of the traditional methods are designed to handle, so you must do everything yourself.
While it's possible to dynamically generate classes at run-time, this is probably not the approach you want to take, because even if you manage to make your BLL adapt to your dynamic database.. the code that calls the BLL will not know anything about it, thus it will never get called.
This is not a problem you will solve overnight, or by copying any existing solution. You will have to design it from scratch, using low level ADO calls rather than relying on ORM's or any automation.

one Library for multiDatabases

Im developing a windows forms application using C# 4.0 and that application is going to target different database engines like SQL, MySQL and Oracle i was wondering if there is a library that can talk to all the three engines instead of implementing my own layers for every one.
thanks in advance.

You could use an ORM tool; I like NHibernate But there are many more: see a list at wikipedia.

The problem is if you want to do anything remotely advanced (date arithmatic, generate primary keys, get the id of the last inserted record, pivot a table , use RANGE construct etc.) then both databases use completely different syntax.
The best solution (in the java world at least is either Ibatis or Hibernate) I know there is a .NET version of Hibernate I am not sure about Ibatis.
These libraries insulate your program from the various SQL dialects and provide a common API independent of the underlying database.

If you use the classes in System.Data.Common you can make your code database independent:
Writing Provider Independent Code in ADO.NET

I don't know C#, but I know it will have a library for ODBC.
It looks like MS has one here.
It's old, but actually it does the job just fine. Virtually every DB in existence provides an ODBC driver.

Checkout DbLinq.
DbLinq is THE LINQ provider that allows to use common databases with
an API close to Linq to SQL. It currently supports (by order of
appearance): MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Ingres, Firebird...
And still SQL Server.