All posts by : XML for ASP.NET Developers

1 of 26 | Integrating Silverlight and ASP.NET AJAX - This video is from a talk given by Dan Wahlin at Desert Code Camp in Phoenix, AZ that discussed how Silverlight could be integrated with ASP.NET AJAX to dynamically display albums obtained from an Amazon.com Web Service. The audio in the room wasn't great since no microphone was used so you may need to crank it up a bit. Slides and code shown in the video can be downloaded below: PowerPoint Slides Download Code Download ...

2 of 26 | Calling Web Services Asynchronously with ASP.NET - This video tutorial walks you through the fundamentals of calling Web Services asynchronously from an ASP.NET page using the .NET 2.0 event driven model exposed by Web Service proxy objects. There are several different options for calling Web Services asynchronously including polling, callbacks and wait handles, but the event driven model is quite easy to use and does not put as much pressure on the ASP.NET thread pool as the other options. ...

3 of 26 | Video: Creating Web Services with the .NET Framework - The video discusses how to create a Web Service from scratch but also discusses some of the pros and cons that you should know about. For example, many people will return a DataSet from a Web Service. While that works, it is not very interoperable with non-.NET clients since the generated WSDL will be quite vague about what the Web Service actually returns. By creating custom types (classes) the WSDL can more accurately show a client exactly what they are going to get back. I have also seen many people put all of the code for a Web Service into the Web Method. That works, but you can achieve better code re-use by creating distinct layers for business and data functionality. These conc......

4 of 26 | Viewing Albums with WPF/E and ASP.NET AJAX - So many technologies and so little time!  It's hard to keep up with all of the great new technologies being released but over the holiday break I made some time to play around with the December CTP of WPF/E from Microsoft.  I was really interested in WPF/E when I first heard about it since it's based upon XML (more specifically, it's based upon XAML) and I've worked a lot with XML over the years.  While there was definitely a learning curve, I was able to put together an album viewer application that leverages the following technologies: WPF/E and XAML JavaScript ASP.NET AJAX Web Services A screen-shot of the application is shown below.  It allow......

5 of 26 | Calling Web Services using ASP.NET AJAX and JavaScript - ASP.NET AJAX provides several different ways to call Web Services including JavaScript, XML Script and the AutoCompleteExtender. In this video tutorial you will see how to call Web Services using JavaScript. Topics covered include creating a Web Service, applying the ScriptService attribute, creating a client-side JavaScript proxy and calling a Web Service using JavaScript and callbacks. ...

6 of 26 | Using the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel, Triggers and PageRequestManager - Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX technology provides a quick and simple way to add AJAX capabilities into new or existing Web pages.  In this video tutorial you'll see how to use the UpdatePanel, refresh it using triggers and detect when it has finished updating using the  PageRequestManager along with JavaScript events.  Other topics covered include using the AutoCompleteExtender control to call Web Services and integrating the Microsoft Virtual Earth API. ...

7 of 26 | ASP.NET AJAX, Windows Mobile 5, Bluetooth GPS and Virtual Earth - I've been playing around a lot lately with a great set of components from http://www.gpsdotnet.com/ that allow GPS functionality to be integrated into .NET applications.  The samples included with the GPS components were awesome and made it simple to do what I wanted (since they did most of the work for me).  I used the components to build a .NET Compact Framework V2 app for my Mobile 5 Pocket PC phone that could read data via bluetooth from a Pharos GPS device and upload it to a Web Service on a scheduled basis for logged in users.  While carpooling into work with my good buddy Spike Xavier I ran the application to get some test data to use.    The da......

8 of 26 | Build an RSS Blog Roller with C# and ASP.NET - This example demonstrates how to build an ASP.NET blog roller that is capable of aggregating multiple RSS feeds and displaying a specific number of items from each one. The application was writen using C# and demonstrates using generics, nullable types and XmlReaders and subreaders to accomplish the task. It also demonstrates how to use the ObjectDataSource control to bind to a business object. ...

9 of 26 | Asynchronous Web Service Options in .NET V2 - As more and more Web Services are made available additional flexibility is needed when calling them. Applications that call Web Services may need to do so in an asynchronous (parallel) manner especially when calling multiple services or services that may take a longer amount of time to complete. The code found in this sample demonstrates how to make synchronous and asynchronous calls to Web Services using features in .NET version 2.0. The included code demonstrates the following types of asynchronous calls: Callbacks WaitHandles Polling Asynchronous Events Asynchronous ASP.NET Pages ...

10 of 26 | Work with RSS Feeds using the System.Xml Assembly - .NET version 2.0 adds many enhancements to the System.Xml namespace and its related classes. This sample code demonstrates how several of these enhancements can be used to consume RSS feeds to display on ASP.NET Websites in an efficient and scalable manner. Different techniques are shown including caching feeds, randomizing feeds, plus more using the XmlReader and XPathNavigator classes. Other alternatives such as the DataSet and XmlDataSource control are also shown. ...

11 of 26 | Binding Relational and XML Data in ASP.NET 2.0 - With the initial release of ASP.NET in 2002, developers were given a simplified way to bind data to controls that minimized coding and reduced spaghetti code. ASP.NET version 2 adds many new classes that further simplify the process of data-binding. In addition to many new server controls, V2 adds several new data source controls as well that are responsible for communicating with relational and hierarchical data sources: AccessDataSource ObjectDataSource SiteMapDatasource SqlDataSource XmlDataSource The sample code available below demonstrates how to use the ObjectDataSource control to access a business object in a logical n-tier architecture, how to select, update, insert a......

12 of 26 | Viewing Customer Data and Maps with Atlas - With the release of the Atlas technology preview developers have a new way to emulate AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) programming concepts while using familiar ASP.NET server control style programming. Atlas allows Web applications to make asynchronous calls to back-end systems from multiple browsers (Netscape, IE, Firefox, Safari, etc.) without postbacks. This provides an enhanced user interface for end users that is more friendly, more responsive and more efficient. This application demonstrates different Atlas features including Atlas server controls with autocomplete enabled, JavaScript integration, asynchronous calls to multiple Web Services and Virtual Earth maps. The sample......

13 of 26 | Dynamic XML Menu Server Control for ASP.NET - Guy S. has taken my original ASP.NET XML menus and extended them significantly. New features include a more object-oreinted code base, permission level checking, control events, caching, support for frames, plus more....

14 of 26 | Using the XmlTextReader Class Video - The XmlTextReader class provides a fast, forward-only API for parsing XML documents. In this video tutorial you will see how to use the XmlTextReader to parse RSS feeds, combine it with the XmlTextWriter class and how it can be used to generate different XML formats such as Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). ...

15 of 26 | Using the XmlDocument Class Video - The XmlDocument class provides a wealth of capabilities including the ability to parse, filter, and edit XML data. In this video tutorial, Microsoft MVP Dan Wahlin shows a few of the ways that the XmlDocument class can be used to work with XML data....

16 of 26 | Combine RSS Feeds and Display Random Items - This code sample demonstrates how multiple RSS feeds can be combined, parsed, and displayed using the XmlTextReader and XmlTextWriter classes in the .NET framework. It can display all items found in one or more RSS feeds or display only a few items in a random manner. Ben Miller (Microsoft MVP Lead for ASP.NET, IIS, and Web Services) and I briefly discussed doing this and I ended up with this code sample as a result. The code parses the RSS feeds using the XmlTextReader, creates an RSSItem struct for each item and adds it to an array. It then uses the array to generate a random list of feed items that can be displayed. The data within the array is converted into HTML by using the XmlText......

17 of 26 | Manage Development and Production Database Connection Strings with XML Serialization - Database connection strings are an important part of any data-enabled application. Because developers typically have development and production connection strings to manage (depending upon the environment they are working in), many different strategies have been created to handle switching from development to production. One popular way to manage this task is to have multiple web.config files and simply name them differently. For example, while in development the production web.config file may be named web.prod.config. When code has been tested in development and needs to be deployed to production the production web.config file can be renamed to "web.config" and then moved over to the p......

18 of 26 | Using the XPathNavigator to Parse XML Documents - The XPathNavigator class (located in the System.Xml.XPath namespace) provides a random, cursor-style API that allows XML documents to be parsed. The ASP.NET pages available in the sample download demonstrate different ways that the XPathNavigator class can be used to parse and extract data from XML documents....

19 of 26 | Generate Dynamic Maps and Flight Routes with XML and SVG - This code sample demonstrates how over 30 meg of XML data containing world mapping points, airport locations, and flight routes can be dynamically parsed and used to generate Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) images. Because the images are vector-based they can be zoomed in and out without affecting the image quality. The example also shows how Web Services can be integrated into SVG. Airports shown on the map can be selected to view temperature and wind data (when available). The SVG image was initially generated by using XSLT but due to the size of the 3 XML documents involved, XSLT was abandoned in favor of using the XmlTextReader and XmlTextWriter. These two classes provide an extreme......

20 of 26 | New Features in ASP.NET Version 2 - While the learning curve associated with moving from version 1.0 to version 2.0 of ASP.NET is by no means as steep as the curve many encountered when migrating from ASP to ASP.NET, version 2.0 is packed with a tremendous amount of new features and functionality that will allow developers to write substantially less code. The code samples available below will introduce you to several of the new features found in version 2 and show the code to put them to use. Keep in mind that since the code samples are based on the Alpha bits, they may change before the final release in 2004. The available code shows a sample Website called GolfClubShack that demonstrates new features such as XML datab......

21 of 26 | New XML Features in .NET Version 2 - Version 1.1 of the .NET framework supports todays mainstream XML technologies including DTDs, XML Schema, XSLT, XPath, SOAP 1.1, DOM Level 2, and XML namespaces. While version 2 of the framework continues to support these technologies (and newer versions where appropriate), it also contains integrated support for SQLXML functionality, simplifies mapping relational data to XML, and provides an execution and compilation environment for a new type of query language called XQuery. The downloadable code available below contains several different demonstrations of using new version 2 features such as XQuery, XML mapping and Views, as well as new classes such as XPathDocument2, XQueryProcessor, ......

22 of 26 | Serialize Arrays and ArrayLists to XML - The XmlSerializer class provides a great way to convert (serialize) objects to XML and back (deserialize). However, it can be difficult to properly serialize collections such as Arrays and ArrayLists unless you know a few tricks. This sample application demonstrates how multiple car class instances can be added into an Array as well as an ArrayList and then be serialized into an XML structure. This serialization process is accomplished by using special XML serialization attributes such as XmlArray and XmlArrayItem found in the System.Xml.Serialization namespace. For example, the following code demonstrates how the type within an ArrayList can be identified using the XmlArrayItem attrib......

23 of 26 | Edit XML Documents with XmlEmend - If you have ever wanted a way to make a quick change to the structure of an XML file then take a look at this example by Andrew Mooney. XML Emend will allow you to edit both the structure and the data of an XML file using the ReadXml and WriteXml methods and the Table and Column properties of the System.Data.DataSet. XML Emend consists of two web pages. The first page one allows you to edit the tables and columns of an XML file. The second page allows you to edit the data contained in the tables of an XML file. XML Emend can create a new XML file in the proper format or open an existing one. Existing files need to be in correct format. See the example XML file and instructions under View......

24 of 26 | Sorting Dates using XSLT Extension Objects - Version 1.0 of XSLT doesnt support sorting dates using the xsl:sort tag. This can present a problem since dates frequently play an important role in various applications. For example, if you have the following XML document, XSLT does not provide a way to sort the Customer nodes based upon the data contained within the CustomerSince nodes: ANATR ... 2002-1-4 ANTON ... 2002-1-3 AROUT ... 2002-1-2 ... This sample application demonstrates how to create a .NET XSLT extension object using the C# language. The extension object can be called from within an XSLT stylesheet and used to sort data such as the CustomerSince node shown ......

25 of 26 | Using the XSLT document() function in .NET 1.1 - Version 1.1 of the .NET platform sports a slightly different XslTransform object with more secure Load() and Transform() methods. Many of the overloaded versions of the Transform() method from version 1.0 of .NET are now considered to be obsolete. If you take a closer look at the Transform() method (in the documentation for version 1.1 of the framework) youll see that the new overloads expect you to pass an instance of an XmlResolver. An example of one of these overloads is shown below: public void Transform(XPathNavigator, XsltArgumentList, TextWriter, XmlResolver); This a little confusing for some because XmlResolver is an abstract class that cannot be created directly. However, ......

26 of 26 | XML-Based ASP.NET Page Templates - Templates provide an excellent way to maintain a consistent look and feel across a Website.  However, version 1 of ASP.NET doesnt natively support the concept of templates.  This isnt a major stumbling block since the .NET platform provides a robust object-oriented environment that can be leveraged to create custom template solutions.  Many different ASP.NET template solutions have been created that leverage the concept of inheritance in .NET.  I was recently tasked with creating an ASP.NET template framework that was very flexible as well as useable by programmers and non-programmers alike.  I researched several existing template frameworks and found that each had defini......