Good article reference, Frank (and congrats again on the MVP!)  I did not know about precedence of when the WHERE clause gets evaluated between the two forms.

This begs a question of me, though.  I recently wrote the following code:

select distinct fieldlist blahblahblah....

from EntityHistory en

join enLookupCodes lc1     --get state

 on ad1.refstateid = lc1.id

join enEntityAddressTypes adt1    --filter address type

 on ad1.id = adt1.EntityAddressID

  and adt1.refAddressTypeid = 950  --mailind addr

join enEntityAddressTypes adt2

 on ad2.id = adt2.EntityAddressid

  and adt2.refAddressTypeid = 951  --physical addr

where en.fiscalyear = 2004

 and en.ownerid is not null   --select schools, not districts

 and en.ctds in (select ctds from EdzOutOfStateEntities)

My question to you is, would putting effectively a Where clause on the Join be 'improper', would it be better to put it in the actual Where clause?  Or perhaps this is more a matter of personal style?

The thing that broke me of using *= and =* was being unemployed for about 10 months and not using SQL Server during that time.  When I started coding again, it was real easy to pick up the Join syntax. <g>