Thanks for your time, this makes it a bit clearer.

Kev

>Comments inline.
>
>>>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.
>>
>>This I understand, and agree with.
>>
>>>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.
>>
>>Yes, I did notice it was particularly aimed at Web Services. I am not involved with Web Services, but writing corporate client management systems which will have no place on the Web - Ever! Unless the government forces us to.
>>
>
>One use for XML that you may not have considered is using XML between tiers of an n-tier application, which may all be on the SAME computer and not even connection to the internet.
>
>
>>Did you finding switching from RDBMS's to XML a bit tricky/fiddly?
>
>Yes. XML sounds so easy, but it rarely is. Its been a few months since I worked with XML on a day to day basis. The XML standards are still evolving. I had several bugs that haunted me until I realized that I had to upgrade to the latest version of Microsoft's XML Parser, version 4.0. Also there are syntax differences between XSL and XSLT. Many examples that you will find on the web are outdated. You have to learn how to read the technical doucmentation at www.w3c.org, the web standards committee. This situation should improve. For example SOAP abstracts much of the underlying XML and makes it easier to deal with.
>
>>
>>The other thing is, is it possible to relate one XML schema to another, like a relationship ?
>
>If you can get it into ADO.NET, you're in luck. There is no recordset in ADO.NET. ADO.NET uses the concept of a Dataset, a collection of tables, similar to a data environment. The tables in an ADO dataset can come from different sources: SQL Server, Oracle, and (I assume) XML data streams. Combine all these datasources into the same dataset (using a Data Adaptor) and you can setup relations between the tables.
>
>
>>
>>Thanks
>>Kev
>>
>>>
>>>-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