how to best design a wrapper for an access database using c# 3.0?

Question

hi guys, i have only very limited exposure with .net 1.1 and a bit of 2.0, so i'm actually pretty excited and confused with the many changes that they have in .net 3.5. so i have this access database but we don't want the other programs from calling into this database directly. so i'm writing a wrapper exe which will contains functions which can be call by the other program to return data (ala web service style).

so for now i have manage to create a console app, encrypted the connection string and pull some data from the database.

1. how do i make it so that the other programs can call this exe's function?
2. how do i return the appropriate data to the calling program?
3. and is there's something wrong or a better design for my case?

i would love to learn from any dot net guys here :) thanks.

Answer 1

Why don't you use existing Data Access Layer technology to encapsulate the call to Access database?

I used Strongly typed datasets for Microsoft Access database before. And you can use NHibernate, too.