One man's meat is another man's poison. I don't like the nested braces syntax and my system is not interested in the XML layout. The straight assignment just seems simpler to me, and I find it useful when I'm doing assignments throughout a program rather than in just one place. Builder is much more powerful. I didn't need the power, but I needed the simplicity. Hence why I built XmlStruct. (That and learning a bit about reflection and meta-programming). NeilW