One of the cool things with Visual Studio is that you can just drag and drop an Access database (either MDB or the new ACCDB format for Access 2007) to the solution explorer to add the database to your project. After a few seconds you will be presented with a wizard to help you through the steps of importing the tables from your database into typed datasets to use in your code or to bind to controls. It's great for experimenting and get you started with databinding. Renaud

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I use the components and other tools developed by this company. The non-ASP tools have lots more features but are not free. They are really cool an useful though and I couldn't do without them. I love the visual effects too... :-)

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if you're using Visual Studio to develop your ASP.Net applications, you may want to have a look at the extremely cool refactoring tools for ASP.Net just made available for free by Developer Express. Have a look at see this blog entry and don't miss the link to the screencast! More info can be seen (lots of screenshots) on this page from Mark Miller, the funny brains behind these productivity tools.

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