Thanks everyone for your input.

It seems like the general opinion is that VID has some useful features that could make it a useful part of web development but only a part of it and that DTC's (Data ??? Controls ?) should be avoided at all costs. I assume use of COM and ADO is more beneficial here?

With all this said, my next question is, is it worthwhile for me to take the VID course my manager wants me to go on, or would I be better served by a course in something else?

>I'll jump in on this one. All the replies concerning the DTCs are absolutely correct. They're crap and I wouldn't recommend them to my ex-wife!
>
>However, having said that, we use VID here to create all of our web sites. We do not use the DTCs or any of the wizards VID offers. All business logic and data access is done in middle tier COM components running under MTS (or COM+).
>
>Yeah the editor isn't great, but none of us use WYSIWYG to do our HTML anyway so we just use the text editor. Since we use COM objects, the Intellisense feature is a big time saver (I don't know if Allaire's product does anything like this). Being able to debug server side script is also a definite plus. It integrates directly with VSS and the integrated data access tools are just too good to give up.
>
>Personally, if they added all this functionality into VB and VC++ I would welcome it. That way all development for all tiers could be handled in one development environment. But until that happens (and I don't think it will in VS7 although obviously I have no way of knowing for sure) we will continue to use it.
>
>>We are starting to look at Web enabling certain existing applications and all new applications and are starting to look at VID.
>>
>>I would appreciate any comments and experiences people have had using VID to determine if this is a good direction to go or if we should be looking at something else. TIA