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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Some great stuff going on with XML lately.

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

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.