>>>>>>>I have been watching the Pluralsight Tutorials on ASP.NET MVC 3 and I am totally confused to the direction I want to following. It looks like (from the little I understood) that ASP.NET MVC 3 "suggesting" (or maybe even requires) to use the Entity Framework and LINQ. Of course I don't quite understand these technologies and also find them very complicated.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>A couple of years ago I created a small WinForms app using strongly typed dataset approach. It was slow to understand back then but it was less complicated (I think) and I had more control.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>So now I am not sure which direction I should follow when building a small ASP.NET application. The application (as the starting point) will be performing the following:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>1. Get a data set from the SQL Server database.
>>>>>>>2. Display the data in the grid view.
>>>>>>>3. Allow user to switch to a detailed view (where fields are in textbox controls).
>>>>>>>4. Allow user to make changes and save (when click on Save button) the changes to the database.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Any suggestions to which approach you like? TIA.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>I'm going to muddy the waters a bit more :-}
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Bill *may* be right in that a SQL Dataset approach is simple - but EF should give you a much better object orientated solution.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>OTOH I don't agree with Craig that 'code first' or even, come to that, 'model first' is a good way to implement EF - it's OK for simple, one-off type applications but the limitations soon become clear in real world scenarios......
>>>>>
>>>>>Thank you for "muddying" the water :). I am exploring all options. Of course, I would like to learn the technology that will serve me in the long run. Ideally I wish .NET would have a VFP CursorAdapter approach (which I love) and that would be the best solution for me. But I know the .NET is still trying to catch up to the VFP <bg>.
>>>>
>>>>SQLDataSource is close to VFP's cursoradapter.
>>>
>>>This is great. Thank you.
>>
>>Only great if you assume that mimicking a cursoradapter is the best way to go (g,d&r from VFPers)
>
>I am not giving up on EF, not at all. I will try to create a small (kind of "Hello World") example using EF too. I just don't want to go through the exercise of creating the entire program realizing later that the approach does not work for me.

Despite what Bill says EF at its simplest is *very* simple. Just select the database tables you wish to use and EF should generate a usable model 'out of the box'. And I would argue that working with entities rather than datasets (or their offspring) is actually more intuitive.
However I accept that *at some point* you will need to really understand the 'innards' of EF and that can be a steep learning curve.