>>Seriously, all our web service methods have a "ref string Message" parameter that will contain any error messages that the server-side stuff may have encountered.
>
>That was the reason I thought of returning an object. An object would contain any amount of data. But I can
>see how it would be cumbersome to return an object.

There are other issues with returning objects ... they may not be recognized by other platforms that may use the Web Service. A few of our customers access some web services from other platforms and we wanted to be sure to maintain platform independence. That's why we return data as a string that's simply the XML representation of the data (MyDataSet.GetXml(), as I already mentioned).

~~Bonnie