The new data aware controls in VS 2005 are all very very “tabular”, most of them work with one table of data. In the 1.1 days (=today) you can use a plain dataset and bind your web form controls to the various tables in that dataset. In 2005 there is the DataSetDataSource control which wraps up a full XML dataset with multiple tables. You fill the dataset in the control from an xml file or pass in the XML as a string. You can save the updates data to a file and get the updated XML as string.

The GetDataSet method returns the wrapped dataset as a dataset object. But why is there no SetDataSet method ? If I want to fill the control from a dataset object I first have to serialize the object to XML and assign the result of that to get the data in.

Peter