Hi folks,
Im pretty new to vb.net and need to develop an application that is required to interface with an SQL server DB.
Using LINQ has been recommended to me for this, but I after an, admittedly brief, attempt to introduce it to my current work I'm wondering if some other approach would suit my needs.

I need to list some tables data, sometimes allow the user to directly edit it and save it back, and in others to edit it only by actions they take (e.g. clicking a series of buttons).
Mainly I need to display data in grid views and drop-down lists, but the data in the SQL tables is not in directly displayable formats on all occasions (e.g. IP addresses in binary(4)) so processing needs to be done on them before displaying - plus pother things like not displaying primary-key ID columns, but creating the next key value if the user is adding a record.
Looking at how some of this stuff is done online it seems I might be better of using data-sets instead -but are these then bound as easily to grid-views etc?

There will probably be a lot of writing of single new records to multiple tables so I get it might be more efficient if one approach is better at doing this than having to read and write a whole table, and then read to show the change, each time this happens

Which would be the best one to spend my limited time learning, or should I be looking at a combination of approaches, and are there any good step-by-step tutorials to get started with? (The MSDN topics I find pretty poor as every other word is MORE new lingo I have to also go and do research on instead of just saying whats going on).

Thanks