>Uh huh. .06 seconds is longer than most of my requests run TOTAL in a Web application. And that's exactly the point. The first hit against a DataSet is very slow because it has to load up all those column objects etc.
>
>This might not be a big deal in a WinForm application but it's a huge issue in Web applications<.

OK, well, you're the web expert and I'm a WinForm expert, so you may be right about the time issue. Still, I can't see where anyone is going to notice a 6/100th of a second's time difference in getting their data.

>Right but that of course diminishes the whole point of a typed DataSet doesn't it?<

True, it does. If you're going to be doing dynamic queries on a regular basis, then perhaps typed DataSets aren't appropriate. There are certainly times where I don't use them, but the majority of my DataSets are Typed.

things in sync. Change the database and your typed DataSet is hosed. You always have that syncing issue.
>
>You can get around that with auto-generation with things like CodeSmith, but this sort of thing should be automatic.<

Yeah, well, it's not automatic, so what ... there's nothing wrong with using tools. I use home-grown ones, but the point is that with your approach (using objects), you still have customized generation tools that you need to use. There's really no difference.

>The other big issue that sucks with DataSets in general is that the Serialization format is a) bloated and b) not supported outside of .NET for the most part. Plain object serialization is more efficient and more easily understood by non-.NET Web Service clients for example. Since a lot of my applications are service based DataSets as results are a no-no.<

Ah hah! Here's where we agree on something (I knew there *had* to be something <g>). Well, more or less maybe ... I have always said that you don't want to return a DataSet from a Web Service, you should only return your DataSet serialized to XML (IOW, MyDataSet.GetXml()). I know what you're gonna say ... that's a lot of overhead, cuz the XML is pretty heavy. That may be so, but we've got pretty large DataSets (100+ tables in some of them) and returning this kind of XML over the wire has not been a problem so far and we don't anticipate that it will ever be a problem.

I hope you won't mind if we continue to agree to disagree on this issue. <s>

~~Bonnie