I have to agree with you, of all things .NET I am finding the most frustration working with ADO.NET. They said they replaced the recordset because of it limited functionality, but I am finding the work arounds to achieve the same functionality that the recordset offered to be painful, non intuitive and less efficient. Why would they not leave it around for backwards compatibility, so people who know how to use it could remain productive and add all the other goodies so you could choose to use them or not? I have also found that most of the books show you how to do things that you would rarely do in a real application. Like building your datasets in code, instead of getting data from a database. What I really find a pain is that each object in ADO.NET offers certain methods but usually has some significant drawback, so you have to create some other type of object to get the required functionality. And who wants to spend all that time learning what each object can or can't do, when before you just had to use the recordset.