Hector,

>Opening a form with many of them (say 30) takes a loooong time at design time in VS.NET<

Why in the world would one Form have 30 DataSets?!?! Seems a bit excessive. We have DataSets that have a lot of Tables (one has close to 100 tables), but pretty much every form only has one DataSet (a few exceptions might have two or three). Secondly, why drop the DataSets on the Form in the Designer? Just add them programmatically with all the other member declarations.

>>Another issue that they ran into with typed datasets was that when there were too many datasets (say 15) defined in a web service, the web service took a rather long time to instantiate.<

Our WebServices are pretty much wrapper classes to the server-side BizObjects, which do all the dirty work. Each WebService really does nothing more than call the BizObject and return one DataSet as XML (or if it's an update WebService, it sends one DataSet as XML to be updated by the server-side stuff). Even so, if our BizObjects were loaded down with multiple DataSets, we'd probably run into the same issue, but they aren't ... it's still pretty much one DataSet for one BizObject.

>>In summary typed datasets have been a pain in this application with little benefit, BUT a lot has to do with the way the application was designed/coded initially, not with the typed datasets themselves<

Sounds like you need to apply a little refactoring. <g>

~~Bonnie