Here's a quick heads up to anyone playing with WCF and having problems getting results they expect on the consumer of their services when using a custom class and the DataContext attribute.  I defined my custom class on both the server and consumer side (per basic MSFT examples) as:

<DataContract()> _
Public Class SequenceReturn
    <DataMember()> Public SomeString As String
End Class

However when the object would be received on my consumer side the SomeString value was always nothing.  What was going on?  After playing around I discovered that the problem had to do with the lack of namespace specification on the DataContract.  I believe that if the root namespace of both the service and consumer were the same then this declaration would work.  For me that is not the case.  Simply changing the declaration to:

<DataContract([Namespace]:="")> _
Public Class SequenceReturn
    <DataMember()> Public SomeString As String
End Class

On both ends fixed the problem.  Wasted 2 hours on this one, hope you don't have to do the same :)

Sean