I, too have hundreds of XPORTS running with PICs. They are fantastic devices.
A couple of things to note, however:

XPORTs are 3.3V devices. You will need a level shifter to convert from the XPORT to the PIC (I use 74HC gates for this purpose), and I put a 1K resistor in series with the output of the PIC to drive the 3.3V input of the XPORT.

Setting up the IP address and other network parameters through the serial port using a PIC is NOT trivial - you have to send it setup records, which are Intel Hex strings.

If you need to do extensive configuration of an XPORT using your PIC, I can give you some pointers.

Charles Linquist