(Highlighting mine). That's hitting the nail on the head. I worked on an app like that. You can't preselect the questions, unless you want to preselect all of them. I think you indicated there are 450 questions so that might be a viable approach. That isn't very much data.

>And that's what I'm trying to find out, the best way to approach doing what I did in the VFP project without losing performance.
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>In VFP, I have 2 cursors which are used to calculate an information function and control content.
>The Content Balancing part, I can probably handle with an array
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>The Information Function (currently in the VFP app) is a cursor that its base columns are pulled from a table and is built column by column (for each question that hasn't been used yet - approx 450 rows and 30 columns) between questions and is used to select the next question along with the Content Balancing part.
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>No, I can't pre-select a subset of questions as the criteria for each cycle changes depending on the last question selected and how the question was answered (correct/incorrect).
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>This is medium weight statistical calculations, something that .Net was never built for.
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>>That's a sure way to have a bad app in .Net. Perfomance and maintenance will suffer. What's behind the scenes should be optimized for the language/platform. Most VFP apps are designed to use cursors (tables and views, basically the same thing). Thousands of apps access .dbf files directly and use SEEK, LOCATE, etc and don't have a single SQL statement. .Net has an entirely different approach to data.
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>>>Craig, Dorris said she is moving a VFP application to .Net, not that she is re-engineering, so what she will produce in .net will be similar in philosophy. I find it strange, weird (suspicious?) that "lots of things do not carry over" to put it in your terms.
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>>>>What specifically do you not understand about LINQ?
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>>SQL is designed for accessing relational data, not objects, not XML, etc. Microsoft wanted something SQL-like. See message #1562504
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>>>There is nothing specific that I don't understand. Well that's not true. What I specifically don't understand is that it takes such an excrurciating long time to get it to work and that it replaces a dml (sql) that is widely used. Writing my first SQL inline in foxpro was a WOW experience. If there's anybody out there who was impressed by what he can do with LINQ, let him throw the first link. (hmm must not be the first one to put it like that.).