Originally posted by nemaroller
Unless you want to query the database each time, a datatable is the easiest format to persist that data between postbacks.
Anyone with more than two days of experience with ADO.NET should know this.

As a dataAdapter is just a set of commands, it doesn't help you persist the data anywhere. It really helps for batch updating though, where manually writing the code would be arrogant.
Again, anyone with more than two days experience should know this too.

In Windows Forms applications, whether the form wizard makes it for you, or you write them by hand makes no difference, other than you cut the slough. If he only needs to throw the data in a table, I would still pass the dataadapter object, and use a datareader. It is still by far, the fastest way to get data.
ok, I realize that using a datareader is akin to what we (back in the day) referred to as a firehose connection, where we would grab the data, read it out of the recordset and into the variable, object etc. in which we planned to use it if we were populating something like an array or listbox, combobox etc.. but the effort necessary to populate a table from data in a reader is just as heavy as using and adapter and table combination, so I still don't see what it accomplishes.