Exposing data from SQL

Whats the real way to expose data from a Data Access Layer?

I've gotten into the habit of making my own wrappers for data. For example I just finished an application which displays 10 article titles + short descriptions in a table and has a paginated link structure to browse all of the articles in my database. To do this I created a class called ArticleModel and it basically consists of 3 strings which I've exposed as fields, Author, ArticleTitle and ArticleText. I have a DataAccessLayer.GetArticles(int articleToStartAt, int numberOfArticlesToGet) and it returns an arraylist of ArticleModels. Yea everything works fine but I don't wanna do things this way anymore!!

Is there an equivalent to a DataBaseResource from php? How does your code expose data for usage in you web app? I read about DataSets and DataTables, and I'd just like to know what other people do in their code. A code example where you run a query and then do ____ to get it into a dataset/other and return dataset/other; would be much appreciated!

My DataAccess.GetSomething() code always ends up looking like this..

  //sql query occurs and then...
  Arraylist myStuff = new Arraylist();
  while (reader.Read())
  {
     myStuff.Add(new MyMadeUpClass(reader["col1"], reader["col2"]));
  }
  return myStuff;

Code (markup):

Thanks for reading.

 

I generally use DataTables.

DataTable ret = new DataTable();

try {
     connection.Open();

     reader = cmd.ExecuteReader();

     ret.Load(reader);
}
catch(...)
{

}
finally
{

}

return ret;

Code (markup):

 

cool, thank you dgxshiny.

Looks like im not allowed to give you any more rep for awhile, so you're gonna have to stop answer my questions j/k