>In a way that's disappointing because that was supposed to be part of XML's appeal, as a "lingua franca" of data -- a means of passing data around in a standardized way. I'm not naive enough to believe any new technology is as good as they say it will be but it's still disappointing.

The main issue is actually VFP here - VFP's XML generation features are pretty limited. There's CursorToXml/XmlAdapter both of which have their own quirks. But there's no native way to serialize objects for example. There's no synchronicity with 'standard' XML schemas (like XML Serialization from .NET for example) so when you need to create XML you have to hand code it using the XMLDom. Most people will think however that it's easier to do this all by hand (no DOM) and it's very likely then that the code will eventually fail because the XML isn't properly encoded.

It's doable but it's very cumbersome. Lots of reinventing the wheel and if you have a choice for getting data sent more directly (ie. via COM for example) I would use it - as long as its possible (since there are also Interop Limitations with .NET which is what started this thread in the first place).