title: Why does Dapper not require an open connection?
body: <p>The Dapper documentation states that it requires an <a href="https://github.com/StackExchange/dapper-dot-net" rel="nofollow">open connection</a>. However in Steve Michelotti's <a href="http://www.pluralsight.com/courses/dotnet-micro-orms-introduction" rel="nofollow">pluralsight course</a> he doesn't open the connection before executing SQL, and I have found that my own testing connecting to SQL Server and MS Access confirms this.</p>
  
  <p>Is it best practice to manually control the connections or is it fine to just leave this to Dapper? Are there situations where Dapper absolutely requires that an opened connection is provided?</p>
  
  <p>Here is an example of the code that I'm executing against an Access database. At no point do I open the connection, however Dapper happily returns a collection of Fund objects:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Private ReadOnly _conn As IDbConnection = New OleDbConnection(ConnectionStrings.GetAccessConnectionString(ConnectionStrings.AccessVersion.v2003,
                                                                                                                ConfigurationManager.AppSettings("MSAccessLocation"), ""))
  Public Function GetAll() As List(Of Fund) Implements IFundRepository.GetAll
          Return _conn.Query(Of Fund)("SELECT * FROM Funds").ToList()
  End Function
  </code></pre>