While digging into some ADO.Net 2.0 a few weeks ago, I found that iXMLSerializable, previously (or is that currently) hidden in .NET 1.x and used for datasets has now been exposed so that we can leverage it. I had been “victimized” (I say that tongue-in-cheek) by accepting the magic of my datasets being transformed into XML by web services to send over the wire. But now I didn’t want to just believe in the magic, I want to know how this works!

Christian Weyer has explained iXMLSerializable in much more depth and also acknowledges that there was a little joke among the web services gurus:

Well, to tell it with a little joke, some people tend to call it ISupportDataSet and not IXmlSerializable. This is because until version 2.0 of the .NET Framework this interface was used solely by the System.Data.DataSet type and some checks for this type had been hard coded in one or the other tools. So, let’s forget about those old days, IXmlSerializable has never been supported officially then, but now it is.

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