>I've not used VFP much in a long time, but maybe you should be using the XMLAdpater instead of XMLToCursor? In your .NET app, if you use Typed DataSets and make use of an .xsd, then you can set the length of your strings in the .xsd schema and pass that to the VFP XMLAdapter rather than getting the schema with DataSet.GetXmlSchema().

The client side code should not change. Many users are already set up for that and I don't want to request that change.

Can you provide an example of what you mean by Typed DataSets?