Event though a field exists on the Advertisements table to store whether the ad is active or not, it is not implemented in the adrotator engine. I'm very curious as to the intention of this field, because the dotnet adrotator control can't read from the database, just the xml file. Is there a mechanism by which adrotator can retrieve an xml element, read the related row from the database, determine that it is actually inactive, then skip it and make another attempt from the xml. It doesn't seem practical to do this and makes we wonder whether there is any use at all in having such a field defined in the table.

Maybe the intent was to recreate the xml file with data coming from the DB anytime there was a change to the ad status?

I've noticed several places in the book where the author's idea was more advanced than the code. They didn't implement all of their ideas.

I think you're right