Hi Jay,

I'd keep record references only constantly available if the cost of creating the object is high. That's the case with out-of-process servers, especially those that are regular applications like Word, Excel, etc. Classes such as the XML parser, however, are comparable light class that are quickly to instantiate. On my machine it takes like 50 ms to instantiate 1000 of these objects. Therefore I would create a new object whenever I need one and store in a local variable.