Hi, Steven
>
>That's very interesting, and rather depressing as well. The performance is currently extremely poor, so if compressing the XML won't help, I am up the proverbial creek...

Well, it all depends on what you are trying to achieve. In my experience as a consultant, one of the problems people have sometimes with Web Services is that they try to use them in the same way they used COM or DCOM, but a properly Service Oriented Architecture should be more coarsely grained, and some kind of operations should have to be handled differently.

What kind of performance issue are you having? Always think that a Web Service (or any other HTTP communication) has a high latency, no matter how fast your connection is. That means that you have to pay a price for every single hit, like establishing the connection, sending yor request, having the server receive and process it, opening the connection again and sending its response. All this is quiete differently than "connected" protocols like COM.

If you briefly describe the kind of application you have to build and what the current problems are, I'll be glad to try to help.

Regards,