Why ADO.NET on client side - SQL Server has OOB rich metadata functionality in information views
Good question actually. I guess it's mainly to give people another option. This was inspired by my research into the SqlConnection object.
However, when trying to reproduce SQL Server relations in a dataset (for the next article in the series) I found that the "ForeignKeys" collection did not even include the columns involved.
BTW, there is a great stairway series on SSC by Phil Factor about the metadata.
Typical incomplete solution - there is a PARADE of technologies but neither of them have a COMPLETE set of CAPABILITIES