.NET & XML

Running the Examples

Many potential .NET developers are put off by the cost of Visual Studio .NET. There’s no need to spend the big money to buy Visual Studio .NET to run the examples in this book—in fact, I’ve written all of them without using Visual Studio .NET. All of the C# code can be compiled and run for free by downloading the Microsoft .NET Framework SDK, either Version 1.0 or Version 1.1, from http://msdn.microsoft.com/.

Here’s a simple “Hello, XML” example that you can try out using the C# compiler (as shown below):

using System;
using System.Xml;

public class HelloXML {
  public static void Main(string [ ] args) {
    XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(Console.Out);
    writer.WriteStartDocument( );
    writer.WriteElementString("Hello", "XML");
    writer.WriteEndDocument( );
    writer.Close( );
  }
}

Once you have downloaded and installed the SDK, you can use the C# compiler, csc.exe, to compile any of the example C# code. The basic syntax for compiling a C# program called HelloXML.cs with the C# compiler is:

csc /debug /target:exe HelloXML.cs

This produces a .NET console executable called HelloXML.exe, which can then be run just like any Windows executable. The /debug option causes the compiler to produce an additional file, called HelloXML.pdb, which contains debugging symbols. The C# compiler can also be used to produce a .NET DLL with the command-line options /target:library.

The C# compiler can also compile multiple files at once by including them on the command line. At least one class ...