ADO+ is an evolutionary improvement to Microsoft® ActiveX® Data Objects (ADO) that provides platform interoperability and scalable data access. Because Extensible Markup Language (XML) is the format for transmitting data, any application that can read the XML format can process data. In the extreme case, the receiving component need not be an ADO+ component at all. It might be a Microsoft Visual Studio®-based solution or any application running on any platform.