Thanks for your replies, the one thing I was still curious about - if any of the apps from your company had used .NET and typed datasets in an application.
Truthfully, I never really saw VFP/SQL views in the same light as I did typed datasets.
Yes, I agree - a structure change means pushing out a change. There are design time changes and runtime distribution changes. For market apps with a large distribution base, I can see what you're describing to be a potential problem.
For ASP.NET and internal apps, this isn't as much of an issue, except for the possible problem of overhead. One of the biggest knocks I'll acknowledge on typed datasets is the overhead, especially when instantiated repeatedly. Some developers have sought out utilities that you'll find on CodePlex that utilize a proxy class to only generate them once.
Now, on the design time end, some installations do this (push out changes) pretty painlessly with automated scripts, and others do it poorly. Typed datasets can (and should) be abstracted to a shared DLL that most source control systems can handle. I would think any installation that finds this kind of change management difficult is probably facing other challenges.
This evening I went back and read some blog entries (some going back as far as 10 years) where developers voiced pros and cons on typed datasets. Truthfully, many of the arguments against them stem from huge abuse of typed datasets. I'm not saying typed datasets are the solution for every application but some of the cons represent worst case scenarios.
I used them quite heavily from 2004 to 2009 across different clients. The truth is that if they had been problematic across multiple release cycles, I would have continued using them and generally advocating them. I've always found the argument of "custom collections vs typed datasets" to be a more fruitful discussion than "typed versus not typed".
On your ORM question. I'm actually not sure I understand it. I've used typed datasets more for complex reporting than any other aspect of an application, though they also have benefits for binding. A typed dataset, in that sense, is really a very simple form of an ORM, where there's no behavior per se, but rather a disconnected set of relational objects.
