>
>I can see those points. On the other hand, some can counter that by saying that Microsoft has been saying for sometime that we should be looking at .Net and data handling is different there. That if we would have been more pro-active and learned .Net 3+ years ago, that it wouldn't be an issue now.

If the Microsoft .NET development team had been more proactive, we might have good data handling capabilities in .NET now.

They had great data handling capabilities in VFP and that is why the VFP developers are still around. .NET is extremely crude and a PITA at best when dealing with data.

I see that LINQ is supposed to be a magic bullet for that (just because people have been using SQL successfully for generations is no reason to keep it around - learn something new instead right?) but from what I see it addresses a problem that didn't exist until they decided to make it (querying collections). Let me query a datatable with SQL syntax we've been using for decades and I'd be MUCH happier.