Database methods in C# or VB .NET?

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I'm looking to connect to a database and select words individually from entries in a table - to be stored as strings which can then be manipulated through the user interface. Any ideas?

I do things like this from SQL through Entity Framework and ASP.Net Core but that might be more complicated than what you need.

Are you trying to do this for personal use or actually send it out to a website?

I wanted to create a program to aid in the learning of languages. A set of words would be stored in a table in a database (SQL or Access or whatever) - one column in English, another in the target language and I suppose another column would be the ID column. These words would then appear in a textbox, generated at random, and would be translated by the user using a separate textbox; scores would be stored in a separate table in the database at the end of the session.

I could probably do it in console C++, but I need a GUI interface, partly because it's more pleasant to use, but primarily because I need UNICODE compatibility (one of the languages I'm learning is Greek), which is a nightmare on the Windows console.

It doesn't matter anymore, at least for the present - my laptop is broken and I can't access Visual Studio. That's why it's taken me so long to respond. Another damned £150 to spend.

Yeah, I don't know how other (computer) languages and frameworks are to work with but I could see a lot of that coming together through ASP.Net Core and Entity Framework pretty fast, or at least the structure of it rather than the words.

I'm going through a bit of a brain crush, ie. learning how to program with something near a gun to my head, so I've got a lot coming in that's only half-processed but I'm getting to see just how salient Azure AD and IdentityServer4 are. I'm probably going to need to tell my coworkers to Look at tying that together via implicit flow (OAuth2 and OpenIdConnect with public clients) because we'll have a really robust structure that could work regardless of whether the client wants the UI strictly inward-facing, wants some VPN access, or even wants every contractor working for them to have it on a phone or tablet.

That's where this thing might get more complex for you though - ie. if you think about sending this out as a downloadable app and understanding all the middlewear you need to secure it.

No, it was purely for my own use. I created a very similar program in VB 2008 a few years ago, which I still use, but it's very crude; I was literally using plain text files for the word lists, which massively complicates things. Maybe I'll take your advice when I can afford to get my computer fixed, but I really want to do this on a platform I'm familiar with.

You might be able to skate by with Access in that case if you're okay with tweaking VBA.

There are plenty of options, access should be avoided like the plague.

I'd go with MariaDB (MySQL) or some similar free DB. Also there are NoSQL options that can be accessed through a REST api, Elastic Search and Neo4J are quite good at what they do, but Elastic is more generic data models (it can even do RegExp searches and find patterns in words) and Neo is good for relationship graphs (could be good for synonyms and metadata on how words are connected), Neo also has CSV import capability unlike Elastic which is a piece of s**t when it comes to importing legacy data.

If all else fails - parse textfiles. It's dead easy and you can focus on your programs functionality instead, .NET allows you do easily handle lines as arrays, you can read everything into an array with: