I have been doing a lot of work recently with Strongly typed datasets and table adapters. We have found that the standard 40 seconds for some methods just wasn't enough...mainly due to big batch processes that call in large amounts of data in a view from various tables. I found a great article which has helped us out on this issue.

It demonstrates how extensible the standard datasets are and I'm sure there are plenty of other neat little extras that could help over time.