It slowed things down to a dead crawl, and gave me over 8000 warnings. Of those, roughly 7800 were complete rubbish, yet considered so Very Very Very important (in someone's imagination) that they couldn't be turned off. Pitched it after a few hours.

It's 'Transition' - in English, you can always verb a noun.

Aha! That did it. I added:

dim cb as new NpgsqlCommandBuilder
cb = New NpgsqlCommandBuilder(m_da)

Where: m_da is a NpgsqlDataAdapter control in the design view. m_cmd is a NpgsqlCommand in the design view. m_ds is a System.Data.Dataset in the design view. New code is after putting the SQL Select statement into m_cmd, and before m_da.fill(m_ds) Thanks very much, this is *much* simpler than some sites made it look. These seems more complicated than it was in VB6. Then, you had a datacontrol and a grid. Load the datacontrol's connection string, set the datasource to the query, 'refresh', all done. Now I have something that works like the demo I described, but it's probably not a very good example, don't know which of the things I've pulled from the web actually contribute to it working yet. At the risk of maybe should have clicked "Rant..." I've only recently started using VB.NET. Started with VB in VB3. Stopped in VB6, because the upgrade wizard crashed on my 300 form, 250 modules/classes application. As of VS2008, upgrade wizard didn't crash, but it's looking like an 80% rewrite; what the upgrade wizard left looks like a transporter accident. data binding (in the converted application) is demolished, usercontrols didn't port for beans, deep heavy sigh. My impression at this point is that VB has lost it's direction - it used to be going toward 'Simpler', ever easier to build stuff. Now it's trying to compete (and doing well at it) with Java and C++. I spent a decade programming in each of those, and chose VB6 for my own projects, because I like results more than tinkering with strongly typed stuff. I liked the direction VB was going, but it took an abrupt left turn with VB.NET. Hopefully I'll get used to it. Probably slightly easier than relearning Java.

I think it's a fair question, and one that has recently been much on my mind. In VB6, making an grid you could update was completely trivial, under VB.NET, after several hours, I'm completely baffled. Are we supposed to hand-code an add / update / insert statement, somehow connect it to something? Is a "CommandBuilder" somehow involved? Is there some "do it automatically" switch somewhere I'm not pushing? adapter.update(dataset) doesn't throw an error, and doesn't do anything either. You'd think someone would have posted a sample project, where you put the query in a textbox, click 'execute', and get a datagridview you can edit, like you could do in 5 minutes in VB6. There are DataGrid based examples from VS2005, but I haven't seen any for the DataGridView. At present, my guess is because this is next to impossible with the DataGridView. Near as I can tell, I'm doing what the instructions say, but nothing happens. Maybe NPGSQL doesn't work?