No problem saving it to the database as varbinary but retrieving and loading it I get an 'Illegal characters in encoding.' error. I looked at the array values and the sixth one is 255 and that is throwing the error. Do I have to do something special to the byte array I am saving to the SQL Server to make it ascii?

Here is my code for retrieving. I embed a call to this in the displaylayout.load method of the grid as the Memory stream parameter:

    Friend Function getUserGridSettingsStream(ByVal gridname As String) As MemoryStream

Dim bSettings As Byte() = Nothing

Dim cmd As SqlCommand = Nothing

Dim DbConn As SqlConnection = New SqlConnection(SQLConnStr)

Select Case gridname

Case "uwgProductionGrid"

cmd = New SqlCommand("usp_GetProductionGridSettings", DbConn)

Case "AdminMaster"

cmd = New SqlCommand("usp_GetAdminMasterGridSettings", DbConn)

End Select

Dim UserID As SqlParameter = cmd.Parameters.Add("@UserID", SqlDbType.NVarChar)

Try

  DbConn.Open()

  UserID.Value = cApp.UserID

  cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure

'this works fine 

bSettings = DirectCast(cmd.ExecuteScalar(), Byte())

Catch ex As Exception

  MessageBox.Show(ex.Message)

Finally

  If DbConn.State = ConnectionState.Open Then

  DbConn.Close()

End If

End Try

  Dim gridSettingsStream = New MemoryStream(bSettings)

  gridSettingsStream.Seek(0, IO.SeekOrigin.Begin)

'when I pass this stream into the displaylayout method I get the error about illegal characters.

  Return gridSettingsStream

End Function

Thanks for the answer, Mike.

I knew I could just do it with XML but also know that Binary would be faster... It is such a small difference that 'at the end of the day' it really shouldn't noticeably matter. I just thought it was weird that it all works until loading the retrieved data from the database (since I have already coded it and that was the final step ... I might add my first reaction wasn't to notice it was weird). I suspect that there is a setting on the SQL Server as to how it stores the binary data that may 'fix' it... on the other hand, it needs to be done yesterday :)

If you do find any insight on how to do this in binary format, let us know.

Again, thanks.

Mitch