Visual Basic® .NET Power Coding

Writing Web Services That Use DataSet Objects

When you define a Web Service to return a DataSet, you actually get a DataSet and not a proxy DataSet. You would agree that a DataSet is a powerful object. The listing in the subsection below demonstrates a Web Service that returns the CommissionsData object as a DataSet, which in a database application you might find more useful than a user-defined object. (And, as my smart friend Eric Cotter said, just think of a DataSet as a convenient way to store data, meaning that you can use a DataSet even with no database, as I will demonstrate next.)

Serializing an Object to an XML DataSet

Listing 14.7 provides a revised version of the GetData method from Listing 14.4. This version returns a complex type, ...