Ok, I'm still confused on something here.

I wrote a method called RunQuery that accepts a query string and returns a DataReader. I then wrote a method
called Login which returns the user's Guid as a string.

Now I'm working on a GetUser method in which I want to return the user's record as XML:

        public void GetUser(string sGuid, ref string sMessage)
        {

            // Clear the message string
            sMessage = "";

            // Define variables
            SqlDataReader oReader = null;
            string sQuery = "select * from appusers where usr_guid = '" + sGuid + "'";
            string sRetVal = "";

            // Call the method to run the query
            oReader = RunQuery(sQuery, ref sMessage);

            // If any data was returned and no error occured...
            if (oReader != null && oReader.HasRows && sMessage == "")
            {

                // Convert the data to XML
                                                        // <----- What goes here?

                // Close the reader
                oReader.Close();

            }

        }

>>>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