John,

>Well unfortunately, you would lose that bet. Datasets and associated datatables are very easy to work with. True - VFP has an integrated language and data engine - and that does translate into some ease. However, that ease does come at the cost of being locked into a specific implementation.

ADO.Net certainly is NOT a local data engine. At best its an storagelayer between the front and backend. It does not have its own DML and relies on the backend implementation. Further it is slow and cumbersome in about any comparison to the VFP way of handling data. The only advantage here is that it is an object based architecture that makes data passing through tehe boundaries of comm easier.

There is no way you describe some outgrown middleware thing like ADO.net as a dataengine...

Walter,