Apart from Anders's article at Artima there has been lots of discussion about this (and research) elsewhere on the web. The general consensus seems to be that checked exceptions seem like a good idea at first, but not such a good idea eventually! However, Spec#, MS's research language, which is a C# superset, does have checked exceptions and I think they provide a rationale for this, given the extra features of Spec#! So maybe some form of them may be rolled back into C#! Confusing, eh?:confused: Kevin

I haven't tried this for a text file, but give the Link Server a try in the enterprise manager. If I remember correctly the syntax is as follows: select * from linkserver...tablename. Michael I firmly believe that any man's finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle - victorious. Vince Lombardi (1913-1970)

Ok, thanks, that's cleared it up a bit. I've asked around work and managed to dig up the DLLs I needed. So that's taken care of. Thanks to both of you for helping. Cheers, Penkov

With the help of a workmate, I've resolved the issue. The quirk was in the Add method of the DataColumnCollection class (which holds the cells for the rows). The writers of the method, in their infinite wisdom, convert the input value to a string before adding it. This is default behaviour. It can be overridden by creating a custom DataColumn to hold the type of the input data. I'm including the code which now works. using System; using System.Data; using System.Collections; class CastTest { const string COL = "test"; static void Main() { Console.WriteLine("CastTest"); ArrayList list = new ArrayList(); string str = "Hello world"; list.Add(str); Console.WriteLine("arrayList created"); DataTable table = new DataTable(); DataColumn dC = new DataColumn(COL, list.GetType()); table.Columns.Add(dC); DataRow row = table.NewRow(); table.Rows.Add(row); row[COL] = list; Console.WriteLine("table created"); object resultObj = table.Rows[0][COL]; Console.WriteLine("resultObj type: " + resultObj.GetType()); ArrayList resultList = (ArrayList) resultObj; string resultStr = (string)resultList[0]; Console.WriteLine(resultStr); } } I guess I should be reading the documentation more closely so that I would be more aware of "features" like this ;) Thanks for the replies. Regards, Michael