Thanks Craig I'll take a look - there's certainly more to LINQ than meets the eye. While I have your ear, what are your thoughts on the entity framework ( which is what spawned my dabbling with LINQ ) would you use it in preference to biz classes and dal / stored procedures ? , over the years I've built up a fairly simple data access class which works very well and is reliable, it provides the basic requirements i.e access to connections, commands and parameter related methods and properties. I struggle to see the benefit of EF over what I have but maybe its because I don't do the web side of things.