Visual Basic® .NET Power Coding

Using Dynamic Interfaces with XML

You can separate data by format by using an XML document to provide the data and an XSLT document to describe the layout. (Recall that XML is eXtended Markup Language and XSLT is XML Style Transform. XSLT is like a cascading style sheet for XML.) Combined with caching and caching dependencies, you can provide users with a custom view of the data separated from the data, needing to render a new page only if some external dependency changes. For example, you could provide users with an order status view, updating the rendered page only when the order status has been updated.

We'll look at each part of XML data, XSL Transform documents, and caching dependencies in the subsections that follow, bringing it all together ...