ClientServer App Question

HI, I have an application that runs as a standalone app on XP and Vista using SqlExpress. I now want to set this up as a client server application. (Client activity will be low, in the nature of 100 - 200 requests per day.)

I have a working model using a TCIP socket that allows me to send a command from the client to the server. The string results are sent back from the server to the client like this:



private void SendToClient(Socket cl, string message)
{

byte[] buffer = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(message.ToCharArray());


cl.Send(buffer,buffer.Length,0);
}

Here are my questions:
1. For my app to work as a client server, I need an entire dataset returned. Is that just as simple as serializing the dataset as an object and sending that to the client over the socket?

2. My model deals only with strings, and the NetworkStreamReader on the client parses the token string from the server and uses the string value of the first token to determine how to process (tokens[0] may be "SEARCH_RESULTS", or ""EXCEPTION" or "NO_RESULT_FOUND", etc). Would I just return a serialized object array to the client where the first object was the equivalent of the tokens[0] string and the other obect would be my dataset?

3. Can someone direct me to a really good text or SqlBooksOnline article that addresses this subject? My searches are not yielding a good example. I am self taught and probably just not familiar enough with the precise terminology to get the pertinent search results.

thanks,

Steve