Converting to a string will not give the big boosts you claim, especially when the desire is to have the data portable across platforms and technologies. I suggest you do some reading on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services. XML is where data sharing is at. No more proprietary data. If you convert a dbf to a string, it is proprietary.

Binary data can be put in an XML string. Microsoft web services use DIME to do this. You can find information on MSDN.

I question the numbers you gave for converting to/from XML.

>I read somewhere that
>1) it takes time to convert to XML and back. Twice as slow on server & 5 time slower on Client.
>2) Each and every field is tagged in XML and if the data is more than a few records the XML file is quite bloated compared to a .DBF using File2Str()
>3) converting numeric fields is also slow. binary data can't be handled (this i might not use).