>Borislav,
>Thanks, I kind of picked that up from articles on the internet. This thing just doesn't seem symmetrical.

No it is not, but remember VFP could handle not only CAs but Views and buffered tables. So everybody is used to use TABLEUPDATE().
But you can (must!) create your own class based on CA and there you could add method named:
CursorUpdate() which can have:

LOCAL laError[1]
IF NOT TABLEUPDATE(1, .t., this.Alias)
   AERROR(laError)
   *** Handle Error here
ENDIF