In vfp, I can read an xml document into a cursor and display the grid in a form, with about three lines of code. How would you go about doing this in vb.net using winforms, webforms, or any other facet of dot net? Yeah, I know, I'm finally poking the bear.

Aren't there laws against that? ;)

Not sure how simple you need it, but let's try this one:

DataSet dsMyData = new DataSet();
dsMyData.ReadXml(@"c:\myxmlfile.xml", XmlReadMode.InferSchema);
myDataGrid.DataSource = dsMyData.Tables[0];

myDataGrid.DataBind();   //  you'll need this for webforms

Let me know if that helps, or if you need something a little more elaborate.