>>>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

Ahhh. Good point.