Hi, Rick,

1) Out of curiosity, were your tests with VS '03 or VS '05? What kind of times were you experiencing?

I took two datasets from a client application. One is a single table with a flat structure of invoice data, the second a normalized result set for an aging report (5 tables with some relations, calculated columns).

In a Winform environment, they took 10 and 30 milliseconds respectively to instantiate the first time. Then I ran a test on my client's test web environment, and they took 80 and 160 milliseconds respectively. (Subsequent instantiations were all less than 1 millisecond). Is that consistent with what you've found?

2) Right now I have two clients with other vendors that are using our XML services (ironically, one is VFP and the other is Java). They're not what I would call high-end services, but were fine with the output we generate. That's the first time I've heard it characterized as a burden. Can you point out any online references or sources that talk about this? (not a challenge, I'm genuinely curious to learn more about this)

3) I'll grant (IMO) that typed DataSets yield more benefits in certain applications, but I really have yet to experience first-hand any situation where they were a detriment (thus my questions to you, to try to understand more specifics on how/when they're a downfall).

If every layer is .NET, then you have the option of serializing in a binary format (in VS '05), and they can make apps with large reporting requirements a little easier to develop. I don't have an issue with writing custom collections, I just like the extra functionality that comes with typed datasets (an opinion shared by some ASP.NET authors, articles from 4GuysFromRolla, Scott Guthrie, MSDN articles, etc.) Sure, there seem to be about as many who intensely dislike them - sometimes I think this is almost as polarizing an issue as the C# vs. VB.NET language wars.

Kevin