It seems I didn't explain myself very well, although you're right in that I didn't read the entire article, the point I was trying to make was that using the legacy functions is expensive not referencing the libraries.
You all made some good points but one thing that may have been missed:
Using some of those legacy functions may impede performance not weather or not the Microsoft.VisualBasic is included in your assembly.
Setr the CommandType to Stored Proc, and the SP name in CommandText.
As long as you have a resultset coming back from the stored proc it will fill the dataset
JD, I really need to disagree with this statement...
"Who's going to code that way every time you need to do a substring? No one."
In the real world you would never get the Length of a string (or any property) unless it has already been asigned a value. Regardless of the property I need from str I will always check its' length first...
If str.Length > 0 then