Richard Hundhausen - Database Geek of the Week
Richard Hundhausen has made his name as an author and trainer, teaching quite a number of courses on Microsoft related topics, including ADO.NET and SQL Server. From the interview:
Doug: You seem to be interested in XML Web Services. What are your recommendations on returning data from a web service? Do you use DataSets, custom messages or some mix of the two?
Richard: I support both. If I were building a web service to return inventory information, for example, I would implement a method called GetInventoryDS() and another one called GetInventory(). The first method would be used by anyone consuming my web services from .NET, because they could easily cast the results back into a DataSet object. The second method is a nice, clean XML document, and built for developers who don’t want to see all the Microsoft namespaces in the return data. If I were doing anything custom or tricky, then classes implementing custom serialization would be in order.
Complete interview here.