In the past I have taken the easy way out and programmed my web
services to return a dataset. This was fine because my consumers were
guaranteed to be .net consumers, so they could easily process the .net
dataset.

Now I must build a web service that returns data to the consumer in a
more generic way, that all consumers (c++, java) can consume.

Is there a helper function anywhere to take care of this easily?

I imagine I just need helper function that will convert the datatable
to xml...

please advise.