I'm not sure whats going on in that book, I read on MSDN more about using it for locking when you are incromenting too. I didn't read the entire book from front to back so I might be missing something there.

Sometimes those books do things one step at a time, then 5 pages later add the rest of the code that would require the locking.

Either way, I decided to put my connection string in the web.config file. I think its a wiser choice in the end.

Thanks.