>Rick,
>
>>I've modified my thinking a bit based on this and feel that if your primary target is .Net it sure is nice to be able to pass a dataset back and consume it without further work.
>
>Yes, it is nice ... but I still think it's best not to count on it being the case and just spend the extra coupla seconds to serialize to/from XML. How hard is it to do a DataSet.GetXml()? <g>

It's not that. It's the bloat in the SOAP package and the data travelling over the wire. Encoding an XML string easily doubles its size (depending on the data density vs fields)... For Web Services that's a significant hit both in terms of perf (encoding/decoding) as well as the bandwidth requirements...