>Continuing the theorizing, what if you don't have control over the web service, and it, for some reason, returns the dataset instead of XML?
>
>I agree that it should return XML, and that would make it much easier to work with.

One would assume that whoever is going to create an XML Web service that returns an ADO.NET dataset object as the return value would know that any consumer of that service would natively support that datatype. I think that scenario would mainly be used for a .NET component talking to another .NET component. I'm not looking for random hypethical possibilities, I'm wanting to know specific needs for the feature/ability requested.