>Thanks for your replies.
>
>To summarise:
>Serilaisation is the procedure whereby an 'Entity' is tranaslated into a format that can be universally accessed ? e.g. outputting a ursor or a Dataset into an XML file.
>
>Is this any different than say copying a DBF file to a CSV file , if we assume that a CSV file can be universally read ?

Generally it is done so the object can be passed over the wire. This is used alot for remoting or web services.

BOb