Applied XML Programming for Microsoft® .NET

A Save-and-Resume Application

As a stateful data format, a DiffGram is particularly useful for building save-and-resume applications. In this context, a save-and-resume application is a desktop or Web application that can work both on line and off line. For such applications, the connection to the rest of the back-end system is optional and is not guaranteed to be up all the time. From the connectivity standpoint, a save-and-resume application is intermittent and must be able to get its core data either remotely (for example, from the central system) or locally (for example, from data persisted to files).

In this section, we’ll build a Windows Forms application that connects to a database, downloads some data, and disconnects. From this point ...