Its human readable and it goes through firewalls. ADO.NET will use XML as the storage mechanism for its tables so there will be no performance penalty to serialize the table into XML and send it through the wire. It works much better in a disconnected, distributed world.

Think of Web Services. A Web service needs to provide information that will go through corporate firewalls or else no corporate users could consume Microsoft's new Hailstorm services. It will work on any consumer device too. Mobile phone, PDA, etc.

-Dave



>Hi
>
>I've just been to an XML seminar and myself and various other developers came away thinking :
>
>"What a load of work/learning etc., and for what?"
>
>Can anyone please enlighten me as to why I would use XML, what's wrong with ASP's connecting to the Datasource, I must be missing something. I can understand it's a common data structure and doesn't require any specialist product to run.
>
>But do the Pro's really way out the Con's?
>
>Thanks
>Kev