1. A computer program product comprising one or more physical computer-readable media having thereon computer-executable instructions that, when executed by one or more processors of a computing system, cause the computing system to simulate that hierarchical data was read from a data stream when in reality binary non-hierarchical data was read from the data stream, the method comprising the following: an act of determining that data is to be provided from a network channel to an upstream hierarchical processing component that processes data in a hierarchical data format; an act of identifying that the data received from the network channel is binary data, not hierarchically structured data in the hierarchical data format that is sometimes received over the network channel; an act of automatically transforming the binary data into an equivalent hierarchical data structure that conforms to the hierarchical data format, the transformation occurring without an explicit request to make the transformation from the hierarchical processing component; and an act of outputting the equivalent hierarchical data structure to the hierarchical processing component in the same manner as the data would be output had it originally been received from the network channel not as the binary data, but as the equivalent hierarchical data structure.