>>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

Not if you're outputting to stream <g>, which is .NET's way of formatting output.