Nice summary. Probably the biggest disappointment with TVPs is how promising they are in concept but how limiting they are in practice. Its unfortunate that one needs to define a .NET data table by hand, to exactly match a TVP, instead of being able to just define a datatable as being of type of the TVP itself.

Its also a tremendous disappointment that Entity Framework does not support TVPs (even in .NET 4).

SQL Server developments often seem so disjointed. What I was really was hoping to see released was something more "object oriented" - to use that abused phrase - something like (a) to be able to define a table "type" (or "class" or "template" or whatever you want to call it), and (b) be able to create a table as of that type, and (c) be able to create a TVP as of that type, and (d) to be able to create an ADO data table as of that type, etc.

(Heck - make "MERGE" know about templates so that when its input is a table and a correspondlingly matched TVP, then it would automatically know how to do its field by field upsert ..)

Anyhow, one abstraction for a "data template definition" and many concrete implementation of that template. And EF supported ! Wouldn't that be nice?