Malcom:

Your investment in ADO is not in vain!

You just need to understand the strenghts and weaknesses of each product. VFP has a really nice OOP data acess engine built right into the product. ADO, which is a just a small subset of the VFP cursor engine, and is only object based (VB too, big minus!), has to go through an extra COM layer to do what it needs to do. I believe using VFP for data access and data validation is the optimal choice and will yield the most flexibility and best performance. But, no where is it written that you have you use it! You can use VB middle tier objects and all ADO if your more comfortable.

Now, once you have brought down your data off the server into the middle tier, and validated it, you now need to pass it on to the your VB front end. Here is where you convert it to a recordset, because you can not pass a cursor through DCOM.

Once you have the recordset on your front end, you can use ADO commands to manipulate it (navigate, sort, filter ect) Here is where all your ADO knowledge comes in handy.

Hope this helps,
Charlie