As a PowerShell developer (yes, I consider PowerShell coding development, when it’s for pre-ETL processing), there are a handful of very useful namespaces .Net.

System.Data – “basic” data containers are classes in this namespace, include DataTable and DataSet. These are generic types, regardless of source or destination database or data source.

System.XML – If you’re ingesting XML data, there are several classes here you’ll use. It’s likely you’ll use XmlReader to stream data or XmlDocument to load a document into memory to read or manipulate.

Microsoft.Data.SqlClient – Updated version to System.Data.SqlClient, used to access SQL Server, including Azure SQL Databases and Azure SQL Managed Instances. SqlConnection, SqlCommand and SqlBulkCopy are a data developer’s best friends.

OfficeOpenXML.Core.ExcelPackage – Working with XLSX files requires an assembly found in the PowerShell Gallery, among other places. Classes in this assembly allow developers to read, update and write Excel data.

This is a placeholder and this post will be updated at a later date…