>Yeah, I know, that's the reason I didn't seriously look at XML as a component messaging method in ADO 2.0. Reading and writing a static file seemed like too much overhead. Do you see an advantage in using streams over recordsets for messaging?

You guys need to loose the notion that writing to a file is expensive - it's not! In fact, file based output in many situations is much more efficient than memory based output, because file buffers are optimized for sequential output. And even writing a string from memory to a file in a single buffer write is blazing fast.

I've shown a few examples of this in the past with doing string concats in memory as opposed to writing output to a file and reading the string in at the end. For a file that's 1 meg the file based output is almost 5 times faster. As the file gets bigger this number increases exponentially!

And don't forget a COM stream is implemented as a file in most cases anyway - you just don't see the physical file because the stream interfaces hide all that.


The biggest problems with files is that you have to put them somewhere and manage lifetime of them (ie. delete when you're done, which sometimes is not so trivial).