>When I first did it, I used the 2nd way you mentioned (DSN) - but rather than using passthrough I used remote views. For me this was easy because I had been using local views for quite a while before this.
>
>Once you get the hang of it, you'll never want to use .dbf's again :)

I started with DSN's also and have many apps that still use them.
Windows 7 and later added complexity, making it more desirable to avoid them.There are some cases where they are necessary but I try to avoid them because of the workstation set up requirements.

I never used local views or cursor adapters.
By the time I learned about them I was well down the road with SQL Passthrough and stayed there.

Agree about never wanting to use .dbf's again. Now that there are free versions of SQL Server, there's no reason to stay with .dbf's.