Articles filed in category 'XML'

March/April .Finalize() column.

Using Oracle as your database in the .NET environment is relatively simple, except when returning JDBC ResultSets from Java stored procedures. The Microsoft and Oracle .NET data provider drivers allow for easy access to data from SQL queries and PL/SQL stored procedures. There is not, however, a simple interface to return ResultSet data from a Java stored procedure to a .NET client.

Systems built with XML and XSLT can often provide much more flexibility and cross-platform functionality than other approaches.Michiel shows us how to build a shopping cart application that's simple, yet highly extensible, and in the process teaches us a few practical uses for these exciting technologies.

Jan/Feb 2008 Doc Detective COlumn.

The official release of Microsoft's Web Services Enhancements (WSE) toolkit promises to help developers deal with at least some of the pain and suffering accompanying the emerging Web services' standards.Updated to support the OASIS WS-Security specification and a promising WS-Policy specification, developers will be able to build standards-compliant Web services in less time and with less code.

LINQ to XML, which makes query a first class construct in C# and Visual Basic, is the new XML API in the .NET Framework 3.5. With the introduction of Language Integrated Query (LINQ), Microsoft is introducing LINQ implementations that work over objects, data, and XML. LINQ to XML improves on System.Xml in the .NET Framework 2.0 by being both simpler to use and more efficient. Microsoft developed this new API because the W3C-based DOM API does not integrate well into the LINQ programming model.

Integrating a web site with a structured database poses a particular challenge. How can a developer provide a flexible, easy to use, yet robust search interface for users to query the information stored in the database? In this article Beth provides a complete solution for this problem using Visual FoxPro, ADO and XML, by providing a dynamic searching mechanism in the middle tier that users can control from the front end.

In episode #271 of .NET Rocks! (www.dotnetrocks.com) Richard and I spoke with Don Demsak about LINQ to XML. Here’s an excerpt from that interview.

Business-To-Business (B2B) communications are rapidly becoming an essential component in today's economy.Some say B2B transactions will soon outnumber Business-To-Customer (B2C) transactions. While we have learned how to do B2C quite efficiently, B2B presents an entirely new set of challenges that we have yet to resolve. Previous attempts were successfully used, but were too expensive to be used as often as B2C. Microsoft tries to resolve this dilemma with Microsoft BizT...alk Server 2000, and it is looking promising! This article provides a first in-depth overview.See More

At PDC 2005, Microsoft introduced brand new technology known as LINQ, which stands for “Language Integrated Query.”The feature-set hiding behind this acronym is truly mind-boggling and worthy of a lot of attention. In short, LINQ introduces a query language similar to SQL Server’s T-SQL, in C# and VB.NET. Imagine that you could issue something like a “select * from customers” statement within C# or VB.NET. This sounds somewhat intriguing, but it doesn’t begin to communicate the power of LINQ.

When people think of having to store data for their applications, a database such as SQL Server immediately comes to mind. However, XML files are very handy for storing data without the overhead of a database. Using XML files to cache often-used, but seldom changed data such as US state codes, employee types and other validation tables can avoid network roundtrips and speed up your application. In addition, XML files are great for off-line applications where a user needs... to add, edit and delete data when they can’t connect to a database. See More

As database developers, many of us have had to dip our feet into the wide ocean of XML.It should come as good news that in SQL Server 2005, you can store XML in the database with a new XML datatype. Although this is good news, many developers have been storing XML in the database for some time now. Without implicit support for XML, developers have been shoving XML documents into text fields since XML’s inception.

Web Services is a powerful technology, even in its basic form.However, with .NET, you can easily couple Web Services with .NET's new data services to provide a powerful data delivery mechanism that works over the Web, making it possible to build distributed applications that work easily without a local data store. In this article, Rick describes various ways you can use Web Services and ADO.NET DataSets to pass data between client and server applications to build truly disconnected applications.

XML is quickly becoming the preferred method of passing information, not only for the Internet, but also across applications and within applications.Until now, developers have been forced to create our own routines to convert data stored in a database system into XML. With the release of Microsoft SQL Server 2000, however, you can query data directly from SQL Server in XML format.

Data in XML format will play a significant role for the foreseeable future.Moreover, it's clear that XML and XSL will play a significant role in most, if not all, of my future applications. Why is it, however, that almost everything we read talks about merging XML+XSL on the client side, which requires IE 5 or higher browsers? In this article, Steve shows how to apply XSL transformations on the server to get around this problem.

Visual Basic 9 in Visual Studio 2008 has a new set of language features that allows developers to work with XML in a much more productive way using a new API called LINQ to XML. LINQ stands for Language Integrated Query and it allows you to write queries for things like objects, databases, and XML in a standard way. Visual Basic provides deep support for LINQ to XML through what’s called XML literals and XML axis properties. These features allow you to use a familiar, co...nvenient syntax for working with XML in your Visual Basic code. LINQ to XML is a new, in-memory XML programming API specifically designed to leverage the LINQ framework. Even though you can call the LINQ APIs directly, only Visual Basic allows you to declare XML literals and directly access XML axis properties. This article will help you master these new features for working with XML in Visual Basic. See More

Jonathan Goodyear (the Angry Coder) discusses MVPs and ASP.NET.

Data is the blood in your system; it sits in its comfortable home of a database, and camps out in the tent of XML, but it deserves to be worked with in a reliable and consistent manner.But why should only data-related operations be reliable? Shouldn’t you want to write reliable code for your other operations? The introduction of System.Transactions in .NET 2.0 brings a paradigm shift of how you will write reliable transactional code on the Windows platform. This article ...dives deep in the depths of how System.Transactions works, and how you can use it to your advantage. You will also see how you can leverage existing System.Transactions integration within ADO.NET, and why you need to really understand what is under the magic carpet.See More

In our service-oriented world, users need the same experience on any device, whether mobile phone, office PC, or Internet café. Moreover, they want the same experience any time they access applications, offline or online. For developers, this means tackling multi-tier, distributed, and concurrent programming. LINQ 1.0 radically simplified multi-tier programming with unified query and deep XML support. TESLA is a broad engineering program by the authors to extend the succ...ess of LINQ with external relationships, reshaping combinators, assisted tier-splitting, and join patterns.See More

If you want to develop code that’s flexible, extensible, maintainable, and testable, you’ll want to read Paul’s article about some basic things to keep in mind before you start.

Along with an easy site with which you can access your account, there are many really cool Twitter clients out there. This is thanks to an exposed API that you can use to access all of Twitter’s features. The great thing is that this API uses a technology that WCF has embraced completely; I’m talking about REST. Though you can certainly use straight network programming to access and update your Twitter account, why not use the technology that Microsoft has put all their ...eggs into as far as communications programming is concerned? Twitter is, after all, all about communicating, right?See More

Chris explores how voice-enabled home assistant devices, like Amazon Echo and Google Home, speak to you and how they learn to understand your particular speech patterns.

XML is one of the key technologies that is driving Enterprise Web development today.XML promises a standard data format that can be shared easily by different organizations. In this installation of this two part series, Rick reviews XML's key features and problems as a data representation format for relational data and objects. He'll also introduce some free tools to provide easy translation between XML and traditional data structures and shows how to use them with quick... examples sharing data over the Web. Next issue Rick delves into some practical examples of how to implement flexible solutions that utilize these XML tools.See More

XML is becoming the messaging standard of choice, and one of the key issues in this architecture is the conversion and transfer of data between client and server sides.In this article, Rick looks at a tool that easily converts Visual FoxPro tables and objects to and from XML, and demonstrates the concepts of XML messaging in a live e-Commerce application.

Ken Getz Jan/Feb 08 FInalize article.

One of Microsoft Office 2003's most significant new features is the integration of XML technology.The XML features of Word 2003 are a great way to ensure that you can always get to the information stored within documents. This article focuses on taking advantage of Word 2003's XML features from within your applications.

XAML properties don’t always behave as you think they might. Markus explains how they work and shows you some nifty ways to use these powerful tools.

You may be wondering, with all the hype over XML, what can XML do for me today?You see the power of XML but may be having a hard time figuring out where it belongs in your application development strategy. In this article browser based applications will be discussed from the perspective of using XML as the data transport mechanism.

As XML becomes more and more prolific in the world of data exchange it's increasingly important that data can be quickly and easily extracted from XML documents and moved into more permanent data stores.Although .NET offers several different ways for performing this task, the XmlTextReader represents the most efficient and scalable solution.

XML is everywhere from XML Web Services to databases to config files to Office documents. This article will show you tooling support offered in Visual Studio 2008 that will make working with XML easier. It will cover editing XML files, working with XML schemas, debugging XSLT style sheets and extending Visual Studio by writing your own custom XML Designers.

The new XML features in SQL Server 2000 give the developer more power to implement distributed solutions.One of the newest features, XML UpdateGrams, allows the developer to handle the inserting, updating and deleting of records while getting around some of the limitations of URL queries and OPENXML. XML UpdateGrams perform their operations against an XML view, which is provided by an annotated XDR schema that contains the necessary information to map elements and attrib...utes back to their corresponding tables and fields.See More

HTML and XML have made the Internet what it is today, but both technologies are not necessarily tied to the Internet.Quite the contrary! Using HTML in regular Windows applications has always been a great alternative. Paired with XML and XSL, this technique is more powerful than ever, since there are a growing number of XML sources, such as SQL Server, Web Services, and XML-enabled Business Objects.

Imagine the potential of accessing your database without needing to know any specifics about how that data is stored.Imagine the possibility of allowing your DBA the freedom to change the database structure without affecting your software code. Impossible? Not with XPath Queries and XDR Schemas. Using these two methods, practically any developer can write a program to access data in SQL Server 2000, just by knowing the structure of the XML documents returned by the server.

Though the XML Editor in Visual Studio 2005 has many improvements, it still lacks support for writing and testing XPath queries. In this article, I’ll show you how to leverage the Visual Studio SDK to extend the XML Editor to allow you to write and text XPath queries in Visual Studio 2005.

XQuery will likely become the dominant language for querying data from most data sources.Although designed for querying XML data, you can use XQuery to tie together data from multiple data sources. In that respect it is much more powerful than SQL, which will slowly but surely be replaced as the main query language.

XSL patterns are the SQL Select of the XML world.To retrieve the data you want from an XML file, you need to understand how to construct the necessary pattern.