You've made a few tentative steps in the right direction. jQuery is the first JavaScript library of which I approve, and which I don't think I could do better myself. Now that is high praise indeed ;-) The Zone's running on jQuery...I use Ajax to download message bodies and forms, and that's what Eri's talking about in the earlier post just below.

I know it's hard to scrape the Microsoft off your shoe. I live and breath Linux servers these days, but I still do my coding and admin and everything else on a tired old Windows XP box. XP? Yeah, that's how much I love Microsoft. I'll go to great lengths to have only the minimal contact with Windows I need to get by, and to avoid sending a penny to Rome...er, I mean Redmond...if I can help it.

LINQ? What? But I put on my Google Omniscience Goggles and now I know it's Yet Another SQL Replacement. Yeah, the world really needed RDO and ADO and ADODB and now LINQ. WTF is it with Microsoft that they have to own every damn thing?

There's really nothing Microsoft has an absolute monopoly on...except the loyalty of corporate America. Sounds more like your challenge isn't the technology per se, but that you seem to work in a "Microsoft shop", aka The Nethermost Circle of Hell.

Poor bastard.