Professional Visual Basic® 2008

Chapter 10. Using XML in Visual Basic 2008

This chapter describes how you can generate and manipulate Extensible Markup Language (XML) using Visual Basic 2008. Of course, using XML in Visual Basic is a vast area to cover (more than possibly could be covered in a chapter). The .NET Framework exposes five XML-specific namespaces that contain over a hundred different classes. In addition, dozens of other classes support and implement XML-related technologies, such as ADO.NET, SQL Server, and BizTalk. Consequently, this chapter focuses on the general concepts and the most important classes.

Visual Basic relies on the classes exposed in the following XML-related namespaces to transform, manipulate, and stream XML documents:

• System.Xml provides core support for a variety of XML standards, including DTD, namespace, DOM, XDR, XPath, XSLT, and SOAP.

• System.Xml.Serialization provides the objects used to transform objects to and from XML documents or streams using serialization.

• System.Xml.Schema provides a set of objects that enable schemas to be loaded, created, and streamed. This support is achieved using a suite of objects that support in-memory manipulation of the entities that compose an XML schema.

• System.Xml.XPath provides a parser and evaluation engine for the XML Path language (XPath).

• System.Xml.Xsl provides the objects necessary when working with Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) and XSL Transformations (XSLT).

The XML-related technologies utilized by Visual Basic include other technologies ...