We have been working on a (.NET, C#) project (yes, believe it or not we still are) and ran into something about ExecuteScalar and ExecuteNonQuery. We needed to know when to use each. I just got an article today that explains what to do and what not to do. Simple? Yes. Common knowledge? Well, we did have to research it.
“Use ExecuteScalar to execute a query to return a single scalar value and use ExecuteNonQuery to execute an action query and return no values.” –John.Papa (from CodeBetter.com).
As for Eclipse, since VS2003 doesn’t have refactoring tools, I found this site. It gets you started on Eclipse without the hassle of re-learning the basic concepts of programming. Refactoring tools are sweet. I wish VS2003 had it. Development would have gone so much smoother for simple mindless tasks like renaming.
I’m creating a project with various samples on how to use the refactoring tools while I learn what push down, pull up, etc. are. I’ll zip and post it somewhere.
You can also use executescalar to return a single value from a stored procedure.