All posts by : XML Tips and Tricks

1 of 20 | Introducing the - As we have seen in previous articles. Creating a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service begins with annotating the class with a <ServiceContract> attribute and an <OperationContract> for each exposed operation. The design of WCF uses these attributes to expose the service endpoints and to determine the mapping of incoming and outgoing data between the worlds of .NET and SOAP. For example if we look at a simple WCF service we can see how this is implemented. At run time WCF uses the service contract to perform the dispatching and serialization of data.  The process of dispatching determines which methods are called for an incoming SOAP message. Seriali......

2 of 20 | Integrating WCF with your existing ASMX Services - I am betting that you have at least one if not more ASMX services available today within your applications. So how do you get going with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and maintain that existing code? In this article we will look at an example of how this can be done. We will start with an existing ASMX service and add the necessary configuration details to this service so that it talks both as an ASMX and WCF service. One advantage of this strategy is that existing ASMX clients are unaffected and your code is reusable within the WCF Service. Updating the Service In this example we start with a basic ASMX Web Service that contains the following files and exposes a sin......

3 of 20 | 2007 Office System Sample: Open XML File Format Code Snippets for Visual Studio 2005 - Pretty nice set of snippets This download includes snippets for use when customizing Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, and Microsoft Office Word 2007. Download and install these snippets to your Visual Studio code snippet folder and use them with the Visual Studio Code Snippets Manager. Example snippets include reordering slides, removing comments and hidden text, retrieving properties, inserting and deleting parts programmatically, and more. Find it here...

4 of 20 | How To: Hosting a WCF Service in IIS - How To: Hosting a WCF Service in IIS In this article we looked at the basics of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and how it can be used to host a service within a Windows Form. In reality, many applications today already take advantage of IIS to host HTTP based services like ASMX Web Services. As a host agnostic programming model WCF can also take advantage of IIS. Technically, when using WCF to host services within IIS they are integrated into ASP.NET. This allows WCF to take advantage of the inherent features of ASP.NET. This includes process recycling, idle shutdown, process health monitoring and message based activation. Probably one of the most important advantages o......

5 of 20 | How To: Building a WCF Service and consumer - How To: Building a WCF Service and consumer Do you see service everywhere? Alright I admit that may not be an original. However, with Windows Communication Foundation and the .NET Framework 3.0 you can.WCF is the unified programming model for building service oriented applications. It is designed to simplify the creation of connected applications through a new service oriented programming model. WCF supports a variety of distributed application development by providing a layered architecture.  The base of WCF provides the asynchronous message passing primitives. The higher level services layered on top of this base include secure and reliable messaging exchange, a typed p......

6 of 20 | Base 64 Format Conversion - Recently, I was working with an InfoPath solutions prototype. The idea behind the solution was that a user would be taking a digital photo (JPEG). As they downloaded the pictures to their local machines, they would be able to include these camera shots into an InfoPath form that contained additional descriptive fields. By default, InfoPath takes these types of binaries and converts them into a Base 64 format. Once converted this data is then saved to an XML file. One requirement of the solution was to convert this data back to its original JPEG format once it was saved to the server, so that it could be displayed or saved. For an example application, I created a simple data source based o......

7 of 20 | Using XSLT and Example - I really like how I can use an XML document to separate the storage of application data from its presentation. The XML document contains a self describing set of data structures that I can define using my own vocabulary definitions. One of the major advantages of these documents is how easy they can be moved across the various process boundaries that exist within enterprises. This isolation of data into an XML allows a host processing the document to make the presentation decisions. An XML document by its very definition contains no formatting or presentation requirements. This is where the Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) plays a major role. In this article I will show ......

8 of 20 | InfoPath and the File Upload Control - InfoPath provides a variety of controls that can be used during form design. One of these controls is the file upload. It enables the direct inclusion of documents within an InfoPath form. Also, it provides the ability to directly browse the local file system to browse and retrieve files from the local file system. It is important to understand how this control works and its effect on your form design. The direct inclusion of these files within the XML document means they are converted to a string using base64. This has some interesting effects on a form if you arent aware of how the control works. In this video, I take a brief look at this control and how it can be used.   ...

9 of 20 | Submitting Forms with Email -   InfoPath provides a variety of ways to submit completed forms. One of the ways that InfoPath provides is through email. However, it is important to remember that this is considered out of process workflow. For example, if the person receiving the email accidentally deletes the email then the form data may be lost. In this example, I take a look at how you can create a data connection with InfoPath that enables submission of an InfoPath form through email. This video can be viewed here.    ...

10 of 20 | Building a Site Map with Visual Studio 2005 - Site maps are a visual way to show the layout of a Web site. Similar to an organization chart of an organization, it provides similar types of services for a Web application. It helps to break down the Web site content into increasingly specific subject areas that helps a visitor to understand the structure of a Web site. Site maps are used to help improve search rankings and as a launching point into any point of a Web site. Traditionally, these were maintained as separate HTML documents. If a site changes regularly this external file often required additional maintenance and formatting. For example, as an external document any time a page was added, deleted, or changed, the external HTM......

11 of 20 | New Article Available - My latest article is available from the folks at .NET Developers Journal   Managing XML Data The benefits to Office-based apps   Last week I had lunch with the application manager of a local customer that just completed their enterprise rollout of Office 2003. We had decided to meet and discuss possible ways his team could begin to utilize this deployment. As we sat down he explained that he had been talking to his team and had been investigating a project that he wanted to discuss. He explained that they had a variety of independent business processes that all ran within various Microsoft Office applications. More...

12 of 20 | New Article Available - My latest article is available from the folks at .NET Developers Journal   Managing XML Data The benefits to Office-based apps   Last week I had lunch with the application manager of a local customer that just completed their enterprise rollout of Office 2003. We had decided to meet and discuss possible ways his team could begin to utilize this deployment. As we sat down he explained that he had been talking to his team and had been investigating a project that he wanted to discuss. He explained that they had a variety of independent business processes that all ran within various Microsoft Office applications. More...

13 of 20 | Introducing the XMLTextReader - The .NET Framework provides a variety of classes and methods to manipulate XML. However, many times an application requires read only access to an XML Data file. This is the perfect situation for the XMLReader. This abstract class provides a fast forward only cursor for XML files and is used in both the XMLNodeReader and XMlTextReader .NET classes. The XMLTextReader reads records sequentially and allows the skipping of element that may not be needed. Overall, this improves the performance as your traverse the DOM tree.   The XMLTextReader provides a cursor that specifies the node in the document. The Read method is used to advance the cursor one node at a time. When initialized the XMLTextR......

14 of 20 | Introducing the XMLTextReader - The .NET Framework provides a variety of classes and methods to manipulate XML. However, many times an application requires read only access to an XML Data file. This is the perfect situation for the XMLReader. This abstract class provides a fast forward only cursor for XML files and is used in both the XMLNodeReader and XMlTextReader .NET classes. The XMLTextReader reads records sequentially and allows the skipping of element that may not be needed. Overall, this improves the performance as your traverse the DOM tree.   The XMLTextReader provides a cursor that specifies the node in the document. The Read method is used to advance the cursor one node at a time. When initialized the XMLTextR......

15 of 20 | Navigating the XML Document - In this post I provided a simple example of how you can programmatically create an XML Document. Once created it can be saved directly to disk by adding the following line of code to end of the function   xmlDoc.Save("cust.xml")   It is important to remember that the XMLDocument is actually an in memory DOM tree. Once the XML source is loaded in the XMLDocument object you can navigate through the DOM and manipulate the data using the .NET Framework classes. The XMLNode provides various methods that can be used to navigate through the DOM Tree. Always remember that most nodes can have multiple child nodes of various types, such as Document, Document Fragment, Entity Reference, Element and En......

16 of 20 | Navigating the XML Document - In this post I provided a simple example of how you can programmatically create an XML Document. Once created it can be saved directly to disk by adding the following line of code to end of the function   xmlDoc.Save("cust.xml")   It is important to remember that the XMLDocument is actually an in memory DOM tree. Once the XML source is loaded in the XMLDocument object you can navigate through the DOM and manipulate the data using the .NET Framework classes. The XMLNode provides various methods that can be used to navigate through the DOM Tree. Always remember that most nodes can have multiple child nodes of various types, such as Document, Document Fragment, Entity Reference, Element and En......

17 of 20 | Building an XML Document in Code - Question: How can I build an XML Document with Code for the Compact Framework? I understand that I can use the tools of Visual Studio, XML Spy or even Notepad to do this. Unfortunately, I dont know the format of the actual XML Document until the application is running.   Answer: It is important to understand the Document Object Model (DOM) provides a set of classes that conforms to the World Wide Consortium (W3C) Level 1 Specification. It is these classes that we can use to both create and modify an XML Document in memory and navigate through the document. It is really the DOM that provides acess to the contents of the entire document. When the XML Parser (System.XML) in the .NET Compact F......

18 of 20 | Building an XML Document in Code - Question: How can I build an XML Document with Code for the Compact Framework I understand that I can use the tools of Visual Studio, XML Spy or even Notepad to do this. Unfortunately, I dont know the format of the actual XML Document until the application is running.   Answer: It is important to understand the Document Object Model (DOM) provides a set of classes that conforms to the World Wide Consortium (W3C) Level 1 Specification. It is these classes that we can use to both create and modify an XML Document in memory and navigate through the document. It is really the DOM that provides acess to the contents of the entire document. When the XML Parser (System.XML) in the .NET Compact Fr......

19 of 20 | Base 64 Format Conversion - Recently, I was working with an InfoPath solutions prototype. The idea behind the solution was that a user would be taking a digital photo (JPEG). As they downloaded the pictures to their local machines, they would be able to include these camera shots into an InfoPath form that contained additional descriptive fields. By default, InfoPath takes these types of binaries and converts them into a Base 64 format. Once converted this data is then saved to an XML file. One requirement of the solution was to convert this data back to its original JPEG format once it was saved to the server, so that it could be displayed or saved. For an example application, I created a simple data source based o......

20 of 20 | Using XSLT and Example - I really like how I can use an XML document to separate the storage of application data from its presentation. The XML document contains a self describing set of data structures that I can define using my own vocabulary definitions. One of the major advantages of these documents is how easy they can be moved across the various process boundaries that exist within enterprises. This isolation of data into an XML allows a host processing the document to make the presentation decisions. An XML document by its very definition contains no formatting or presentation requirements. This is where the Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) plays a major role. In this article I will show ......