>To get schema information you need to load the dataset with schema info by using the DataAdapter.MissingSchemaAction property and setting to MissingSchemaAction.AddWithKey.
>
>As to the output generated - if you're generating to string you'll get Unicode output because all .NET strings are Unicode - there's no such thing as a UTF-8 encoded string. If you need to pass UTF-8 encoded text back to whatever you can use Encoding.UTF8 to convert to bytes and pass that back instead.

thanks, Rick!
I'll try it this way. It's far more work than just do a "cursortoxml()" in VFP.