Many examples of
web services in books,
the MSDN and on the web show operations that return
DataSets. I think that this is, in general, very bad practice. Now and then I mention this in courses and seminars I teach and it always causes great discussions. So to provide some ammunition for my fellow believers I decided to create this entry (I might even make a article out of it) to refer to.
Here are some bullets:
And of course we need alternatives! Next to returning arrays of business objects (Customer[]) we can also return xml documents that comply to a specific schema. But how do we create a flexible and at the same time type safe schema?