>It seems awfully complicated for him to have converted all that data to all those collections when Typed DataSets would probably have worked just as well. We have Typed DataSets that contain extra methods and properties to make them even more useful. And DataBinding works better with DataSets than with collections (at least in 1.1 ... it may be better in 2.0, I don't know though for sure because I haven't tried it).

Agreed. The guy was a young kid (in his early 20's, from India), hired by a consulting company to do this job. He was here a few months. I did not have any contact with him or knew what he was working on. A month after he left, his unfinished work was dumped on me with a deadline. No specs and no inline comments.

The code is actually very good an save a few bugs here and there, very complete. It seems that he went by the OOP book. *Everything* is OOP. I think he overdid it. I mean, coming from VFP, I had no problem following the OOP logic and inheritance (up to three levels) once I got the gist of the app, and stepped by through it. But going deeper and deeper into several levels of nested collections when I'm used to returning datasets was an eye opener, and a hindrance.

Every bug fix and addition of features I did had to maintain the same design, logic, and architecture so it was sometimes a pain. Couple it with being a 3-Tier app (logical and physical), with three separate web services assemblies and the complexity grows. It is certainly ther most complex .NET web app I've worked on. I did learn a lot of technique, even if I don't agree with parts of his design.