TDS Protocol
For most of you who have been using stored procedures and following the MS guidelines in .NET Application Development, you must have been using SET NOCOUNT ON as stated in Chapter 12 of the Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability.
Although the MSDN docs was enough to tell me that with NOCOUNT set to OFF (man, their keyword sucks, the one often used should be the default variable, this is just like IsPostBack for ASPNET), the row count data which is often not needed is always transferred, I wanted to know the internals of the data being passed between SQL Server and the client application. I was lucky to find this TDS Documentation.
As many of you know, SQL Server uses this Tabular Data Stream Protocol in passing data. The TDS documentation was able to give me a snapshot of how data is being transferred between SQL Server and the SQLClient Data Provider.
http://www.freetds.org/tds.html