the adoption of XML will enable the Web to enter a new dimension of use and usefulness. In this chapter from his book, Dave Carlson shows you how to recombine the XML information content with a presentation that is appropriate for the viewing device and the user's requirements in order to create a portal application.

In a recent issue of this column, I gave you a quick overview of the new features in ADO.NET 2.0 for data access. Now I want to cover what is new on the XML side of the data access equation in .NET 2.0. XML usage for a variety of data scenarios continues to grow by leaps and bounds. There is just no better approach to bringing together heterogeneous data than working with it in the form of XML. As such, Microsoft continues to try to make the XML management capabilities of .NET more and more powerful to make your life easier.

In XPath Basics I gave a quick introduction to the syntax of XPath expressions to help the uninitiated get comfortable with XPath, which is a very important technology to understand for working with XML data of many forms. The thing about XPath is that it can't do anything on its own; it needs a processing engine to perform work based on the expressions. That processing engine could come in many forms.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 4.0 was the first Web browser to support XML. Since then XML support has been introduced in various Microsoft products, such as Office XP and SQL Server 2000. Microsoft re-assured its commitment by including extensive support for XML in the .NET framework.

Sometime you may need to query a database and produce the results as an XML file. The .Net XML Web Control makes this extremely easy to do. All you have to do is create an instance of the XML control on your .aspx page. A very few lines of code can then be used to display the database query as XML. To show you how easy this is, note the aspx file immediately below - two lines of code, counting the @Page directive!

It’s not a secret that all real-world applications require a centralized data storage of some sort. The times when MS-DOS based text files where sufficient for settings storage is long gone. Today, every self-respecting Web or Windows application has to provide users with personalized settings, content-updating personnel with access to all application data and in general, information storage that is constantly updated and changes the way data is selected and presented. All enterprise-level solutions have of course advanced needs in data storage; MS Access simply won’t do for gigabytes of data and thousands of concurrent requests. That’s where data servers come in. If you are creating simple applications with data sources, then you must already be experienced with an established data server application, such as Microsoft’s SQL Server and Oracle.

This article will demonstrate the conversion of a delimited file into a DataSet or an XML file. For the purposes of demonstration, I’ve created a tab-delimited file for the Roach Motel’s room service department.

XML is very well integrated with .NET. Many server controls have XML methods built in making XML capabilities only a method or two away. The DataSet class contains several of these XML methods and we will examine a couple of them in this article. The task in this example is to read a database table into a DataSet and then write the DataSet out to the file system as an XML file. We will also do the same thing with the schema for the XML file.

We recently did an article on how to save the data from a DataSet to an XML file on disk. This is a companion article on how to save form data to an XML file on disk. There are any number of reasons to do this so you might as well know how to do it. There is some repetitive typing involved to get the code set up, but it is fairly straight ahead once you see the logic in it.

Many applications would not be complete without some form of editing, but sometimes editing XML can be a daunting task. In this article, Jerome Kuptz delves into the editing capabilities of .NET's XML classes.

I like XML. I really do. Still, my eyes glaze over just as much as the next person's when I hear about how wonderful it is. Wonderful it may be, but as a Web developer, how does XML help me?

The Command objects in ADO.NET (such as OleDbCommand and SqlCommand) are a central aspect of the .NET database access strategy. When used properly, they provide excellent performance and security.

This is a sample of an extensible mechanism to add a markup model on top of an existing .NET Framework object model. This sample’s parsing rules can be summarized as “XML elements map to .NET Framework types and XML attributes map to Type properties (or events)”. This sample includes a markup parser that dynamically generates an object instance tree from an XML file

In this article, Larry considers the security risks that exists with the current XML authentication standards.The XML Digital Signature Standard establishes how XML can functionally sign itself over an insecure network like the Internet. While this effort does not require an established PKI to function, it may require the use of trusted XML servers for authentication. Consequently, each enterprise will have to evaluate the potential security risk of outsourcing this increasingly critical business function

Does the System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer contains a memory leak? Read this blog entry to learn more about that.

Generally, business components will have several methods exposed to implement different functionality. This short article illustrates how to get the same functionality by only exposing a single method to the interface.

Christoph Schittko discusses various techniques for diagnosing common problems that occur when converting XML to objects and vice versa with XML Serialization technology in the .NET Framework.

The .NET Framework is the foundation of Microsoft's next generation of development tools. Given the increasing importance of XML in all areas of programming and data processing, the inclusion of powerful, integrated XML support in .NET is not surprising. This chapter provides a brief overview of .NET and then details the XML tools that are provided by the Framework and the Visual Studio .NET development environment. Code samples in this chapter are written in the C# language. This is a new language introduced with Visual Studio .NET.

Despite all its promise for free data exchange among disparate applications, Web application developers still contend with XML's shortcomings. Startup Clear Methods claims to have developed a powerful yet simple solution: XML as a general-purpose programming language called Water.

Everyone knows that among its many uses, XML can store the same data in multiple languages and dish it out like a U.N. translator when the computers of the world come calling. What everyone doesn't know is how best to structure that polyglot of data. There's more than one way