This chapter described the factors behind implementing interoperability. You saw the importance of ensuring class consistency and methods for implementing serialization. You also looked at basic type mappings between XML data types, .NET data types, and Electric XML data types. Finally, you examined the three most common interoperability scenarios and the best practice recommendations to deal with each of these. With this information, you can now move on to examine the different interoperability mechanisms in detail in Chapters 4 and 5.