Approach for executing stored procedure on .NET 4 application

My .NET 4 console application has to execute a SQL Server 2005 stored procedure to retrieve desired data set. Since I've been using some .NET1.1 or .NET2 technology with my legacy system for a long time and not familiar with new technology. I was wondering if there's any new technology is recommended in this scenario? There are some terms like Entity Framework 4,开发者_开发知识库 LINQ, etc... making me confused. Hope the community can advise. Thanks.

EF, LINQ - these are good things but they are also a bit advanced. Crawl, walk, run, is my suggestion.

The classic approach will still work - create a SqlConnection class, create a SqlAdapter, set it's command properties and execute it.

Next step would be to create a strongly typed data set and define your data adapaters within it - get familiar with how that works before moving on to EF (which builds on the concept).

Always good to learn the plumbing. :)