Mark -

VS2005 is pretty good at automatically generating basic data access code for MySQL and Oracle, in my experience. It will not be anything really spectacular, just basic SELECT, DELETE, INSERT, and UPDATE statements. You will always need to tweak the non-SELECT statements to have a key, of course. I have not used VS2005 on any complicated SQL Server databases, so I don't know if it does something with SQL Server above and beyond what it can do with other data sources. Overall, VS2005 is much, much better than VS2003 with a lot of the under the hood stuff. My favorite improvement is not putting ASP.Net projects in C:\Inetpub\WWWROOT and using a local IIS process, but doing its own hosting out of the projects directory. It really makes it so much easier to deal with!

Add in generic Lists such as:
Dim Verbs as List(Of String)

And VS2005 + .Net 2.0 is an extremely worthwhile upgrade.

J.Ja