>The irony is I don't think MS asks or even wants these people to spout, they just do it I guess to prove their loyalty. Not all of them- there were some maverick VFP MVPs and there's a local SQL Server MVP who doesn't exhibit MS fanboi colors AFAICS. Even if he did (does?) extol the virtues of SP using inefficient clumsy typed datasets for data work. ;-)

I'm assuming you're referring to me. I certainly make my living based on the MS Product stack but I have no problem admitting/pointing out a deficiency in product functionality.

Next month I'm doing a PASS webcast where I'm doing to talk about Power BI - and one part of the presentation will cover specific visualization scenarios that Power BI can't (yet) do, but can be done in SSRS (with some programming).

In the last 5 years, I can't even count the number of times where I've talked about two overlapping products that are subsets and supersets of each other. It can be frustrating for developers in the field, but I've always tried to work that kind of information into community presentations, so that people are at least aware of where the (current) gaps are.

As for typed datasets, I honestly don't know why you continue with that. I acknowledge that typed datasets have overhead. They are not perfect. But they were (and still are) an absolutely viable option for business-level reporting against transactional databases. Admittedly they lend themselves better to specific reporting tools - so YMMV on how much value they'll provide. But I would make an argument that some people who rather inattentively criticize them have probably not worked very much on line-of-business apps in a multi-developer scenario.

Bonnie Berent (Bonnie DeWitt) got me into typed datasets back in the 2002 period and she's always been a huge advocate of them. (She also got me thinking years ago about ways to automate their use in a changing database environment). Cathi Gero also has posts here from years ago on the topic. Care to point me to a post where you chided either of them for supporting typed datasets?

My first book proposed a framework for reporting using typed datasets and I know for a fact there are some outfits that still use the framework.