>I just read an interesting article on the web about serializing (haven't had time to play with it yet). Instead of passing DataSets (or their XML equivalent) between tiers you pass objects serialized into xml.

Yes, this is very powerful indeed. I use serialization in a number of applications for a number of tasks including shipping data back and forth over Web Services.

It's also extremely useful to use serialization to avoid any use of a database in small utility type applications - an array of objects can as easily be persisted as a single item for example...

I personally prefer working with objects because it fits the business logic that the client code works with much better than shipping data back and forth. THe problem in .Net is that most business objects will likely contain some sort of dataset/datatable references inside of them - but luckily even that serializes properly (but one has to be real careful to only serialize what you want and not *everything* in the dataset).