No-hassle SQL connection strings

Most applications working with a database handle the connection string in one of two ways: Hard-coding the full string or doing some amount of string concatenation. A typical concatenation method looks something like this:

public string OldMethod(string server, string database,

                        string username, string password)

{

    string connectionString = "Data Source=" + server + ";";

    connectionString += "Initial Catalog=" + database + ";";

    connectionString += "User ID=" + username + ";";

    connectionString += "Password=" + password;

    return connectionString;

}

I admit this is fairly simple code. The only potential issues might be a property name typo or a misplaced (or missing) semicolon. But why hassle with even that much when the dotNet Framework has the same functionality built into the SqlConnectionStringBuilder class? With a reference to System.Data.SqlClient, the above method can be replaced with:

public string NewMethod(string server, string database,

                        string username, string password)

{

    SqlConnectionStringBuilder connBuilder 

        = new SqlConnectionStringBuilder();

    connBuilder.UserID = username;

    connBuilder.Password = password;

    connBuilder.InitialCatalog = database;

    connBuilder.DataSource = server;

    return connBuilder.ToString();

}

In either case, the output is identical:

Data Source=myServer;Initial Catalog=myDatabase;User ID=myUser;Password=myPassword

Note: If you are working with a database other than MSSQL, there are several other classes derived from the common DbConnectionStringBuilder base class, such as OdbcConnectionStringBuilder and OracleConnectionStringBuilder.