> Do you do business processes? Check out message #1215372 ... ;-)
>
>Good grief....
>
>Question for you....are you a Mere Mortals .NET user/customer?
>
>I have a different perspective - if typed datasets are indeed an "old technology", custom lists (even though they're greatly improved in VS2005 with the new List class) still have a little ways to go to contain all the functionality that datasets do. (which, after all, is important to those who want developer productivity and data munging, right?) <s>

It all depends on what your background is and how your framework or framework code handles lists. Any entity framework will pretty much provide equivalent functionality of what a dataset provdes with the cleaner interface of a plain old CRL object.

The real problem with typed datasets in particular are:

They are damn slow in Web applications (they fire a lot of initilization just to start up)
They don't serialize in a way that non-.NET clients can handle easily say in a Web service (they don't get schema'd in WSDL)


I've been really on the fence with DataSets and an Entity scheme preceisely because of that and my V1 business object version basically uses a hybrid scheme that uses entity objects for single record CRUD and datatables for list data.

I don't think I've ever used a typed data set in an application <s> - but I get the same strong typing through a more light-weight mechanism in my own framework that just wrappers the data row without all the overhead of loading up the entire database hierarchy for every instantiation.

I guess my point is it all depends on the approach taken, but there are many developers frowning on the DataSet model per se as MORT technology <s>... not sure if I agree, but if you get into any architecture discussions DataSets tend to not be a part of it.


FWIW, I've been wanting to move to a purer entity scheme for some time, but I've been holding off purely because of the update mananagement issues that are so nicely encapsulated by DataRow/DataTables. I think though that .NET 3.5 will address a few of these issues with the various entity schemes that will be provided (LINQ to Enitities and the ADO.NET Enitty Framework).