Great to have you hear, Brother. First off, I haven't seen RPG in YEARS. Believe it or not, some people still use it.
Your concerns are understood. I would read up on LINQ extremely fast, because it is a great technology that I use as much as I smoke cigarettes (bad analogy there). The ADO.NET Entity Framework, and LINQing to it, are the way to go when you want to access data. WCF is an awesome technology that promises to turn the Web Service work upside down. WPF is cool, but I don't use it yet, so I cant comment. Same for WF. LINQ is my first stop for you, though.
