>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?
>

Hi again Colin,

To address your first question, using COM to access data from your ASP pages is, in my opinion, definately the way to go. You can quite easily separate your business logic and data access functionality into distinct COM objects, allowing you much greater flexibility for change down the road.

We have used VB (with ADO) for both business and data access objects. We have used VFP for both as well. The nice thing about using VFP for these COM objects is that you can use native VFP tables for your datastore, and you can access them directly in your COM objects. No ODBC required. I prefer the VFP language for data access COM development due to its rich data handling functions, and my familiarity with it.

Like Gary (I think it was Gary...) mentioned in an earlier post, we do use VID for the front end web page development...without the DTC's, of course.

As far as the course goes, personally I would rather take a COM development course that one purely for VID. There is an IT school here in Halifax called ITI (I think they have campuses all across Canada http://www.iti.ca) that offers a three week COM intensive course (VB, ADO, ASP) on building database enabled web sites. A couple of our guys from the office went. I believe it ran about $8,000 CAN, which is reasonable considering the knowledge they brought back.