They are damn slow in Web applications (they fire a lot of initilization just to start up)

I think 'damn slow' is a relative term. I know you talked about this several months ago. I have a few ASP.NET 2.0 apps that are using them, and we haven't had any kind of performance issue. I'd say roughly half the developers I know, use them.

However, in a very high volume environment, I can see it being a different story. Sure, an application that frequently creates an instance of the same typed dataset may spend a measurable % of time on the creation process. If it's really bad, there's a library over on the Code Project that uses a proxy class for typed datasets so that the actual creation only needs to occur once.

They don't serialize in a way that non-.NET clients can handle easily say in a Web service (they don't get schema'd in WSDL)

If it's a non-.NET client on the other end (which I've only had to do once), I pass them as XML strings.

I guess my point is it all depends on the approach taken, but there are many developers frowning on the DataSet model per se as MORT technology <s>... not sure if I agree, but if you get into any architecture discussions DataSets tend to not be a part of it.

Actually, I think it depends on who you're talking to... <s> Sure, talk to Rocky Lhotka and certainly groups of people and you might hear them bashed. I've also heard them misrepresented. Talk to others and you'll find they're used and written about regularly, with people building their own libraries around them. (and in fairness, some prejudices as well).


I think though that .NET 3.5 will address a few of these issues with the various entity schemes that will be provided (LINQ to Enitities and the ADO.NET Enitty Framework).

Agreed. (And not to change the subject, but your blog post on LINQ and dynamic query results was interesting. Personally, I'm most intrigued about querying in-memory objects and XML, but LINQ should bring something for everyone).

Thanks,
Kevin