Hey Joe. Good to see you back here again.

>I am soo tired of everything being such a solid pain in the keister.

I had found some things akward to do, but these are candidates for burying in a class. Other than that, I find that most of my code is calling objects and manipulating UI controls. Feels a lot like VFP.

>The .Net books I have gotten have all been useless in real application if I want to be wizard boy great

There are tons of .NET books, but very few dealing with n-tier design. Most books talk about how to bind a sql table to grid, or some such thing, which totally breaks n-tier design. I still haven't purchased a .NET book but will get Kevin's when it comes out.