I am writing an Windows Mobile application using C# and the .NET Compact Framework. The application is a streamlined client for one of our desktop products which is written in VFP8. Communication with the VFP data is done via Web Services written in VFP.

One of the functions of the software is to maintain a local copy of a subset of some of the data. Some of this data I store in SQLCE tables, and some I simply store in local DataSets. The problem is that at startup, several of the tables I need are likely to be empty and I cannot pull an empty cursor into a DataSet via it's ReadXML method because it crashes. In that situation, I would like to be able to just return an XML Schema and create the DataSet with an empty DataTable. This would save me a lot of time coding up structures manually, and a lot of maintenance issues trying to maintain those data structures.

I am very much a beginner at .NET and at XML, so any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,

Paul Moon
Business Software Solutions