Bonnie,

>Sounds like I missed a good discussion ... the LINQ to SQL session I attended barely touched on this issue. I remember arguing with Luca at the Summit in 2005 about this very thing. This and typed DataSets. At the time, he didn't quite "get" what it was I was trying to tell him. It sounds like there's support for DataSets now, but no one seems to want to talk about it. I'll have to do my own digging I guess.

We've all got some digging to do if we want to have an influence on what's coming...

>I'm still not 100% convinced that LINQ to SQL is going to improve much in the way of Data Access ... you still have to figure out the changes on your own unless you've made the data changes in the same instance of your Data Access class ... not a likely scenario in a distrubuted architecture. Unless I missed something totally (which is possible I suppose <g>).

I've got a laundry list of articles lined up to read over the next week or two about all the varieties of LINQ, and I'll probably start looking at the March CTP release.

I'm approaching it from the angle of what work would be needed by the community to implement a LINQ to VFP translation piece that could be ready by the time Orcas releases. Because LINQ to SQL is initially Sql Server only and they don't plan a provider model in the first release, it will be more work than if they had designed it "right" to start with, but that's usually the case in first versions, huh? There is LINQ to DataSet but that may not be the most efficient way to build a LINQ to VFP that would talk via the OLE-DB driver to Fox tables -- time will tell.

As for the updating, I saw some roundtrip query/update demos in the VB meetings but haven't dug enough yet to understand what was going on.

Interesting times...