Unless one has been living under a rock for quite some time, it is probable that one has heard of Extensible Markup Language (XML). It is a language that allows its users to define a custom vocabulary to represent structured information in a way that is both vendor and platform independent. XML has quickly become the de facto standard for representing data on the Web. This book reports on the tools provided by the .NET 2.0 Framework to work with it.
The introductory chapter presents an overview of XML fundamentals and its most important features. It also provides a few step-by-step tutorials on creating Windows applications and class libraries with Visual Studio 2005. The remaining chapters are organized into three logical sections, namely: foundations, advanced features, and miscellaneous.
The foundations part comprises chapters 2 through 6, which describe how to read, manipulate, and write an XML document using two different styles: document object model (DOM) style, in which the whole document is loaded and can be accessed in memory, and simple application programming interface (API) for XML (SAX) style, in which the documents are read or written piecewise to improve performance and reduce the memory footprint when dealing with large XML documents. This part also reports on: querying XML documents using XPath, validating them against document type definitions (DTDs) or XML schemata, and XSL transformations (XSLT).
The advanced features part comprises chapters 7 through 10. Joshi provides information on: working with XML and ADO .NET, which is Microsoft’s database technology; using XML to serialize or deserialize complex .NET objects; creating and using XML-based Web services; and working with XML documents in SQL Server databases.
The miscellaneous part comprises chapters 11 and 12, and three appendices. Chapter 11 presents the many uses of XML to configure the .NET Framework, which includes .NET remoting servers, ASP .NET applications, and documenting source code. Chapter 12 presents creating Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services. The appendices show how to create custom XML readers and writers and a sample e-commerce service, and provide links to useful resources.
Summing up, the book provides many details on a broad range of interesting topics, and I think that it is suitable for developers who are already proficient in .NET and C# and wish to learn how to get the most of XML in their applications. However, I must point out that this book provides very few details about the concepts behind the scenes, since most sections consist of only one example and a walk through of the code. It is a little disturbing that the examples use default names for controls and event handlers, such as button1, checkBox3, or textBox5_Click, which makes it difficult to follow since there are no clear connections between these names and the screen shots that show the examples at run time. In conclusion, this is a good book for people who have the time to relax and learn from examples; for rushed people who need to get to the point as soon as possible, I recommend complementary readings [1,2].
