When working with cursor-style APIs like the XmlReader or XPathNavigator, the pattern usual becomes something like this (note this is the same code for both APIs):

At Microsoft one of our goals in developing software is that backwards compatibility when moving from one version of software to the next is high priority. However in certain cases the old behavior may be undesirable enough that we break compatibility. An example of such undesirable behavior are bugs that lead to incorrect results or security issues. Below is a list of breaking changes in the System.Xml namespace in beta 1 of v2.0 of the .NET Framework.

Visual Studio "Whidbey" leverages existing ADO.NET and XML investments, and enables developers to perform data access tasks in drastically fewer steps and fewer lines of code. Watch this video to explore creating data access components complete with custom validation logic, consuming data from databases and the middle tier, and rapid integration of data with Windows Forms and Web Forms. Then see the new XML editor that enables enhanced validation against XSD and DTD schema, XSLT debugging, and more.

This is a video showing Steve Balmer talking about the XML.NET.

Are you interested in presenting a 45-minute talk on some applied XML or Web Services topic? It doesn't matter which platform or OS you're targeting. It also doesn't matter whether you're an author or vendor or professional speaker or a developer in the trenches (in fact, I tend to be biased towards the latter). We're after interesting and unique applications of XML and Web Services technology and if you're doing good work in that area, then I need you to send me a session topic and 2-4 sentence abstract along with a little bit about yourself.

It seems every few months there are a series of blog posts or articles about why returning ADO.NET DataSet objects from XML Web Services. I saw the most recent incarnation of this perma-debate in Scott Hansellman's post Returning DataSets from WebServices is the Spawn of Satan and Represents All That Is Truly Evil in the World and Ted Neward's More on why DataSets are the Root of all Evil.

I've been using the Microsoft ExceptionManagement ApplicationBlock and I spent some time creating a nice ExceptionXmlPublisher because the one described in the docs has some flaws. Using the xml publisher removes the need to run the EventLog installer to be able to create the eventlog. Having the exceptions in Xml also works nicely in a distributed environment, and with continous integration.

Some great stuff going on with XML lately.

I just read Tim Bray's entry entitled SOA Talk where he mentions listening to Steve Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jon Udell, Dana Gardner, and Dan Farber talk about SOA via “The Gillmor Gang” at ITConversations. I tried to listen to the radio show a few days ago but had the same problems Tim had. A transcript would definitely be appreciated.

I have finally posted the slides and sample code for my TechEd 2004 talk on XML in the .NET framework. The samples require a copy of Visual Studio 2005 (i.e. the community drop distributed at TechEd) in order to compile and run.

I agree that one of the downfalls of the current .NET Web service implementation is that it kind of shoe horns you into using the DOM to deal with XML when you might prefer to use an XmlReader/Writer or some other XML api. So an advantage of passing XML as a string is that you can load the string into an XmlReader and avoid the overhead of loading up an instance of a DOM. This idea has some merit in my mind, not a ton, but some.

This topic came up in the win_tech_off_topic list, and it caught my attention. The concept is that specifying a date in your XML document that does not conform to ISO 8601 format cannot be validated as a date type, but rather you must contrive your own simple type. For processors that use the post-schema validation Infoset (PSVI) for strong typing, this presents some non-obvious problems.

XML.com recently ran an article entitled Document-Centric .NET, that highlights the various technologies for working with XML that exist in the .NET Framework. The article provides a good high level overview of the various options you have for processing XML in the .NET Framework. The article includes an all important caveat which I wish more people knew about and which I keep wanting to write an article about but never get around to doing.

There has been dicussion (and people have noticed) about a Connected Page Viewer Webpart. There are several viable approaches to this scenario. One is to use cross-page connected webparts, but those require FrontPage interaction. There has been suggested that inheritance can be used from the PageViewerWebPart. Good luck: It's sealed.

A few months ago Mark Fussell wrote an article entitled What's New in System.Xml for Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 Release. Mark Ihimoyan has a followup series of blog posts which mentions which of the new features of System.Xml mentioned in Mark's article will actually be in the .NET Compact Framework.

The schema library in Word 2003 is where so much is happening for developers. While some end-users will venture into the schema library, most should not care what is in there. A well-architected Word XML solution should keep the inner-workings tidy and transparent.