Consuming Microsoft .NET SOAP server datasets in PHP

Microsoft Just Clowning Around Again

If you're impatient here is the link that this article leads to

SOAP is generally understood to be a simple method for systems to exchange data in a standard manner. This allows for remote systems to make calls on a server application. This sounds like a Good Idea.

Microsoft, however, does not appear to fully understand the concept of SOAP when it comes to providing a SOAP server based on "datasets".

Apparently the use of these datasets make it much easier for programmers using Microsoft languages to consume web services.
Unfortunately it makes it inconvenient for everybody else.

So we have a standard way of doing things, but Microsoft decides to "improve" it and thereby forces everybody else to manually parse their XML responses. What is the point of having a standard method of accessing server methods if Microsoft then makes their implementation inoperable to Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, developers?

Isn't the whole idea of SOAP to allow remote access? So why make things difficult for everybody except the people who choose Microsoft as their vendor for Server, Desktop, Development IDE, Programming Language, Email, and Security? What about somebody who wants to use a vendor other than Microsoft for one of these software services? Is it technically better? Is it better for a client to be locked into a vendor? Or does Microsoft make more money by trying to force you to make them your vendor for all software?

Well in any case, if you are trying to consume a Microsoft dataset SOAP packet you will end up needing to write your own helper classes to decipher their code. That's the bad news. Trust me, I asked on Stackoverflow, Googled extensively (I didn't use Bing to search though, maybe I should have), and otherwise checked and rechecked why I was not able to handle the SOAP packets being returned by the Microsoft server.

PHP developers can use this code (http://www.bin-co.com/php/scripts/xml2array/) as a start to developing their class. The code given there will help shortcut the process of reading the Microsoft dataset SOAP response. If anybody has similar solutions for other languages please feel free to forward them to me.

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