>I'm don't see how the platform strengthens the argument. A Winform app might still have a large amount of dataset processing in an application tier. (I agree with Bonnie, I've never seen the time being an issue).

No? What about the fact that in a Web Application you have to reinstantiate the DataSet on every page? In a WinForm app you can get away with creating the dataset and reusing it throughout your app off that single reference that never goes away so you pay the heavy load price only once. This is not the case in a Web application.


>Just a note that in 2.0, you can easily serialize a dataset as a binary file if you're using remoting. This cuts down the size by at least a factor of 6.

As I pointed out to Bonnie I was talking more about Web Service serialization. The bulk of the format is a concern, but the biggest issue IMHO is that a DataSet is not a schema'd entity in the context of a Web Service and thus is difficult to consume by anything but .Net. Essentially any non-.NET solution needs to look at raw XML and then decide what to do with it - most likely manually parse it.