Best practice? open and close multi connections, or one large open connection for ado.net

Question

I am using ADO.Net for some database connectivity and I was just hoping I was doing it the right way. I am opening and closing multiple connections for each stored procedur

Answer 1

ADO.Net uses connection pooling, so that should lower the cost of opening new connections avoiding any need to have one connection open throughout your whole application.

However, there is probably still some overhead to shuffling the connections in the pool, so if you have code that is run sequentially and immediately, within the same portion of your code, then you are probably better off using a single connection for that short span. Check Adam's answer for a bit more on that - you want to get everything else set up first so that the connection is open for as short a time as possible.

If any ADO.Net programmers can confirm or correct this, please do.