A lot of my after hours time is spent improving my XML DOM object skills.

However, when I looked over my projects at work, I realized CSV file formats are probably more important than XML.  Why?  Because engineers like to use Excel.  It seems to be the most important adhoc analysis tool used in our industry.  Long before our statistical analysis tools are unleashed, rough calculations are derived in Excel.  And what is the file exchange medium of choice for importing data into Excel?  Comma-Separated-Value files. More...

I am not impressed with the speed of the DataGridView control in the following scenerio:

• Dataset is persisted as XML file.
• Dataset contains two tables, one relationship and two primary keys.
• Performance when accessing DataRows in code is very fast.
• Performance when populating the DataGridView control with 300+ rows and 40 columns of data from a table in the Dataset is abysmal.

We are using XML format to persist data for a variety of customer requirements.  We probably should have used SQL Server mobile or compact edition, but we didn't.

Beware of using the DataGridView until you examine application performance with realistic data.