I've been going through the 2nd edition and enjoying it very much. I have come to the chapter on Data Access, however, and have hit a brick wall. The code on page 523 does not run for me. When I hit the line that reads:

    conn.open();

It hangs for about 30 seconds and then issues an unhandled exception message.

I looked through this forum and noticed that somebody has already had this problem but I did not understand the response that was posted.

The problem is, my undertstanding of database THEORY is pretty good but my understanding of all of the drivers, services, clients, connection issues, security issues, etc, etc, is absolutely minimal. I have looked for and failed to find any book or literature that even begins to de-mystify this sector or computer science.

I have no idea if my system is set up to run this example code. On page 516 of "2nd Edition" says that if I install the .NET SDK, the directory "(local)\\NetSDK" should contain the Northwind Database. I installed the .NET SDK TWICE and it did not install the Northwind database, nor did it create the NETSDK directory. (I performed a complete harddrive search). I do have Microsoft Access and it has placed a database called Northwind into its sample directory so I just pointed the code at that instead. Was this wrong?

The bottom line is I would like to understand what I need to do so that I can continue my work with this book.

Can anybody help?
Thank you,
Eberly