The TableAdapter is a new component brought to us by Visual Studio 2005. This is basically the strongly typed equivalent of a DataAdapter. When you create a new typed dataset now, the wizard aks if you would like to add any methods. By default, there are methods available that allow you to fill a DataTable, return a DataTable, as well insert/update/delete directly from a database.
When you opt to create a Fill method for example, it then asks you to specify a query or stored procedure. You can even create multiple methods to fill by different parameters (i.e.: different id columns).
When you create the new dataset, besides the dataset there will be a table adapter class created for each table. For example, if we have a dataset called DealsDataSet and it has a datatable called Deals, a TableAdapter would be created called DealsTableAdapter. If we create a Fill method that filled the DataTable by ContentId, a statement to fill the table would look like this:
DealsTableAdapter.Fill(contentId);
These new DataSet methods should prove to be useful any time we have simple Sql data access requirements as it will allow us to cut out a lot of ADO.NET code.
Read the complete post at http://www.dotnettipoftheday.com/blog.aspx?id=165