title: What is the most efficient way to access the value of a field in an ADO recordset?
body: <p>I have a VB6 application in front of me, which accesses Sql Databases via ADO.</p>
  
  <p>When retrieving recordsets, the application uses the Bang (!) operators to access the fields in the recordsets Eg RS!OrderId.</p>
  
  <p>Whilst I am aware of this practice, I have never actually used it(except when I have been lazy), Neither have I used RS("OrderId") as I have always (or usually) used the fully qualified method (eg RS.fields("OrderId").value. or even expanded it further using the .Item Property.)</p>
  
  <p>Both return exactly the same value, one is shorter to type than the other.</p>
  
  <p>The reason I have stuck to this method is that sometime in the far distant past, I believe I was told that it was more performant to fully qualify the field, as the code had to translated each occurrence of the ! operator to its fully qualified sister. However, the ! operator reduces typing and as such dev time.</p>
  
  <p>I also seem to recall that the ! for ADO was going to be deprecated at some point in the future. But it still seems to be around in code I just wondered which method is regarded as best practice and which one performs better over the other.</p>