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An accessible and step-by-step approach to using VB.NET and XML enterprise application development

XML is a tool for interacting with, describing, and transporting data between machines across networks and across the Internet-perfectly suited for Microsoft's .NET plan to fully integrate the Internet into distributed computing. By using real-world and fully-functional examples, this book quickly brings Visual Basic programmers and developers up to speed on XML for enterprise application development. The authors include an overview of XML and how it works with VB.NET, then explain how to use it to manipulate data in distributed environments.

Companion Web site at www.vb-helper.com features the complete working code for all the examples built in the book.

Microsoft Technologies
.NET Platform: The next big overhaul to Microsoft's technologies that will bring enterprise distributed computing to the next level by fully integrating the Internet into the development platform. This will allow interaction between any machine, on any platform, and on any device.

Visual Basic.NET: The update to this popular visual programming language will offer greater Web functionality, more sophisticated object-oriented language features, links to Microsoft's new common runtime, and a new interface.

ASP.NET: A programming framework (formerly known as Active Server Pages) for building powerful Web-based enterprise applications; can be programmed using VB.NET or C#.

C#: Microsoft's new truly object-oriented programming language that builds on the strengths of C++ and the ease of Visual Basic; promises to give Sun's Java a run for its money.

XML Web services are the next logical step in the evolution of the Internet. Teach yourself how to write and deploy XML Web services for Microsoft® .NET—one step at a time—with this modular, accessible tutorial. It delivers expert, task-based instruction plus a real-world XML service example to help you apply what you already know about Microsoft Visual C#™, Microsoft Visual Basic® .NET, and object-oriented programming so that you can learn XML Web services development at your own pace. Topics covered include:

UNDERSTANDING XML WEB SERVICES

• XML Web services architecture
• XML Web services protocols
• Web Service Description Language (WSDL)
• Discovering XML Web services

BUILDING XML WEB SERVICES

• Writing .NET XML Web services
• Testing XML Web services
• Debugging XML Web services

CONSUMING XML WEB SERVICES

• Discovering XML Web services
• Generating a proxy class
• Creating clients that consume XML Web services
• Consuming XML Web services asynchronously
• Consuming XML Web services with HTTP

ADVANCED XML WEB SERVICES

• Managing XML Web service state
• Securing XML Web services
• Using data sets with XML Web services
• Using SOAP headers

This is the book every Internet application developer needs to quickly get up-to-speed on the new .NET and Visual Studio .NET technology used to build Windows applications. The authors provide authoratative information about the Common Language Runtime and .NET Foundation Classes, which form the building blocks for application development in the .NET universe. The construction of Web Services and how they communicate with each other is demystified by the thorough coverage of ASP.NET, XML, and ADO.NET.

Visual Basic® .NET Developer's Guide to ASP.NET, XML, and ADO.NET provides:

• Unbiased, in-depth commentary on the efficacy of the various technologies that comprise .NET as they pertain to Internet database developers
• Technical know-how without crushing the reader with pointless detail
• Implementation details that replace and extend the existing Active Server Pages (ASP), XML, and ActiveX Data Object (ADO) functionality currently supported by Microsoft
• Practical Visual Basic .NET code examples that illustrate operations used most often by application developers
• Thorough reference material to the objects available in the Foundation Class libraries

XML is the de facto language for communication both within and between distributed applications whether they are on the Internet or a corporate network. It owes its success to its two key strengths: a highly-structured human readable format and the fact that it can be transmitted as pure text. No matter how disparate applications and their architectures may be almost everything can read text files and hence can accept XML data. This gives it a great advantage over rival technologies such as Remoting which were previously popular but which are now being replaced by XML-based solutions.

This book will be the first to provide a complete solution to XML on the .NET 2.0 Framework including the new .NET 3.0 extensions that are being released in January 2007. It will provide readers with everything they need to know to take advantage of XML in every aspect of their working lives up to and including integration using Windows Communication Foundation.

In May 2001, Microsoft announced the Office XP suite and introduced the concept of Smart Tags. This technology provides the dynamic recognition of text or data within a document and allows the association of various actions with the text. In this article, Darshan Singh looks at how we can build a smart tag handler DLL in Visual Basic 6.0 that uses the .NET web service to get the data. The smart tag handler discussed here allows travel agents to get their corporate clients' travel details as soon as the clients' identification numbers are entered in Excel 2002. The smart tag handler recognizes the corporate client ID, sends a request to .NET web service that returns the travel details in XML format, and the smart tag handler processes the returned XML using Microsoft XML Core Services (MSXML) 4.0 and fills the information into an Excel sheet.

XML is now an established technology for the description and transportation of data, and has made a major impact on almost every aspect of software development. When Microsoft introduced the .NET Framework, they took advantage of XML wherever they could. No other technology is so tightly bound with .NET as XML, both at the developer level and underlying the whole framework.

This book aims to give the reader enough information to be able to use XML from within the .NET Framework in the most efficient manner possible. It will explain in detail the usage of all the XML-related .NET Framework library classes for the manipulation, validation, transformation, and serialization of XML data, using both C# and Visual Basic .NET. It also looks at how the developer can utilize the full power of XML within the .NET Framework, for example, with the new XML capabilities of ADO.NET and ASP.NET. As is demonstrated, the .NET Framework itself uses XML, in configuration files, meta data, and C#'s XML code documentation mechanism, for example.

This book is aimed at intermediate-level programmers who have started on their journey towards .NET development, and who want to see how to use XML within their applications to its best advantage. Basic knowledge of C# or Visual Basic .NET, XML, and XML related technologies (XSLT, XPath, and XML Schemas) is necessary.

This book covers:

Reading and writing XML
DOM navigation and XSL transformations of XML
Validating and serializing XML
MSXML vs System.Xml
ADO.NET and ASP.NET XML support
Web Services and SOAP
Remoting
XML code documentation

Make the jump to distributed application programming using the .NET Framework—and introduce a new level of performance, scalability, and security to your network and enterprise applications. Expert .NET developer Matthew MacDonald shares proven techniques for fully exploiting .NET Remoting, XML Web services, and other .NET technologies and integrating them into your real-world solutions. MacDonald digs into key .NET building blocks and architectural issues, explaining which features and designs will best serve your customized distributed application projects—and when to use them. Case studies with full code examples illustrate these practical techniques in action, as well as demonstrating their benefits and tradeoffs.

Learn how to:

• Cross application boundaries with .NET Remoting, XML Web services, and Message Queuing
• Create responsive clients and scalable servers with multithreading
• Model your distributed application with interfaces, facades, and factories
• Use COM+ services such as object pooling, JIT activation, and transactions
• Craft a data transfer plan with Microsoft ADO.NET—without concurrency errors
• Help secure your code end to end—from the transport level to the presentation tier
• Learn ways to avert—or unclog—performance bottlenecks in your applications
• Automate deployment using self-updating applications and XML Web services
• Master stateless programming and other best practices for distributed applications

XML is the de facto language for communication both within and between distributed applications whether they are on the Internet or a corporate network. As such, the .NET Framework 3.5 relies upon XML for much of its communication and configuration. All .NET developers need to know how to use XML and how to best take advantage of the .NET Framework's excellent XML support.

This book provides the only complete solution to XML on the .NET Framework 3.5, making it an indispensable guide. No knowledge of XML is assumed and the author shows, through many hands-on examples written in C# 2008, how to get up and running with XML in the .NET Framework. The comprehensive coverage ensures, however, that even advanced uses of XML are covered. This all-inclusive approach means a wide range of developers will find a use for the book, both as a reference and as a tutorial.

• The foundation for most Web services, XML can also be used with ASP.NET to display data from an infinite variety of sources in a Web site
• After covering the basics, the book explores the many ways that XML documents can be created, transformed, and transmitted to other systems using ASP.NET 2.0
• Two major case studies address issues such as reading and writing XML data, XML data validation, transforming XML Data with XSLT, SQL Server XML integration, XML support in ADO.NET, and XML Web Services

Language Integrated Query (LINQ), as well as the C# 3.0 and VB 9.0 language extensions to support it, is the most import single new feature of Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.x. LINQ is Microsoft's first attempt to define a universal query language for a diverse set of in-memory collections of generic objects, entities persisted in relational database tables, and element and attributes of XML documents or fragments, as well as a wide variety of other data types, such as RSS and Atom syndication feeds. Microsoft invested millions of dollars in Anders Hejlsberg and his C# design and development groups to add new features to C# 3.0—such as lambda expressions, anonymous types, and extension methods—specifically to support LINQ Standard Query Operators (SQOs) and query expressions as a part of the language itself.

Corresponding additions to VB 9.0 followed the C# team's lead, but VB's implementation of LINQ to XML offers a remarkable new addition to the language: XML literals. VB's LINQ to XML implementation includes XML literals, which treat well-formed XML documents or fragments as part of the VB language, rather than requiring translation of element and attribute names and values from strings to XML DOM nodes and values.

This book concentrates on hands-on development of practical Windows and Web applications that demonstrate C# and VB programming techniques to bring you up to speed on LINQ technologies. The first half of the book covers LINQ Standard Query Operators (SQOs) and the concrete implementations of LINQ for querying collections that implement generic IEnumerable, IQueryable, or both interfaces. The second half is devoted to the ADO.NET Entity Framework, Entity Data Model, Entity SQL (eSQL) and LINQ to Entities. Most code examples emulate real-world data sources, such as the Northwind sample database running on SQL Server 2005 or 2008 Express Edition, and collections derived from its tables. Code examples are C# and VB Windows form or Web site/application projects not, except in the first chapter, simple command-line projects. You can't gain a feel for the behavior or performance of LINQ queries with "Hello World" projects that process arrays of a few integers or a few first and last names.

This book is intended for experienced .NET developers using C# or VB who want to gain the maximum advantage from the query-processing capabilities of LINQ implementations in Visual Studio 2008—LINQ to Objects, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to DataSets, and LINQ to XML—as well as the object/relational mapping (O/RM) features of VS 2008 SP1's Entity Framework/Entity Data Model and LINQ to Entities and the increasing number of open-source LINQ implementations by third-party developers.

Basic familiarity with generics and other language features introduced by .NET 2.0, the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE), and relational database management systems (RDBMSs), especially Microsoft SQL Server 200x, is assumed. Experience with SQL Server's Transact-SQL (T-SQL) query language and stored procedures will be helpful but is not required. Proficiency with VS 2005, .NET 2.0, C# 2.0, or VB 8.0 will aid your initial understanding of the book's C# 3.0 or VB 9.0 code samples but isn't a prerequisite.

Microsoft's .NET code samples are primarily written in C#. All code samples in this book's chapters and sample projects have C# and VB versions unless they're written in T-SQL or JavaScript.

Professional ADO.NET 3.5: LINQ and the Entity Framework concentrates on programming the System.Linq and System.Linq.Expressions namespaces for LINQ to Objects, System.Data.Linq for LINQ to SQL, System.Data.Linq for LINQ to DataSet, System.Xml.Linq for LINQ to XML, and System.Data.Entity and System.Web.Entity for EF's Entity SQL.

• "Taking a New Approach to Data Access in ADO.NET 3.5," uses simple C# and VB code examples to demonstrate LINQ to Objects queries against in-memory objects and databinding with LINQ-populated generic List collections, object/relational mapping (O/RM) with LINQ to SQL, joining DataTables with LINQ to DataSets, creating EntitySets with LINQ to Entities, querying and manipulating XML InfoSets with LINQ to XML, and performing queries against strongly typed XML documents with LINQ to XSD.
• "Understanding LINQ Architecture and Implementation," begins with the namespaces and C# and VB language extensions to support LINQ, LINQ Standard Query Operators (SQOs), expression trees and compiled queries, and a preview of domain-specific implementations. C# and VB sample projects demonstrate object, array, and collection initializers, extension methods, anonymous types, predicates, lambda expressions, and simple query expressions.
• "Executing LINQ Query Expressions with LINQ to Objects," classifies the 50 SQOs into operator groups: Restriction, Projection, Partitioning, Join, Concatenation, Ordering, Grouping, Set, Conversion, and Equality, and then lists their keywords in C# and VB. VS 2008 SP1 includes C# and VB versions of the LINQ Project Sample Query Explorer, but the two Explorers don't use real-world collections as data sources. This describes a LINQ in-memory object generator (LIMOG) utility program that writes C# 3.0 or VB 9.0 class declarations for representative business objects that are more complex than those used by the LINQ Project Sample Query Explorers. Sample C# and VB queries with these business objects as data sources are more expressive than those using a arrays of a few integers or last names.
• "Working with Advanced Query Operators and Expressions," introduces LINQ queries against object graphs with entities that have related (associated) entities. This begins with examples of aggregate operators, explains use of the Let temporary local variable operator, shows you how to use Group By with aggregate queries, conduct the equivalent of left outer joins, and take advantage of the Contains() SQO to emulate SQL's IN() function. You learn how to compile queries for improved performance, and create mock object classes for testing without the overhead of queries against relational persistence stores.
• "Using LINQ to SQL and the LinqDataSource," introduces LINQ to SQL as Microsoft's first O/RM tool to reach released products status and shows you how to autogenerate class files for entity types with the graphical O/R Designer or command-line SqlMetal.exe. This also explains how to edit *.dbml mapping files in the Designer or XML Editor, instantiate DataContext objects, and use LINQ to SQL as a Data Access Layer (DAL) with T-SQL queries or stored procedures. Closes with a tutorial for using the ASP.NET LinqDataSource control with Web sites or applications.
• "Querying DataTables with LINQ to DataSets," begins with a comparison of DataSet and DataContext objects and features, followed by a description of the DataSetExtensions. Next comes querying untyped and typed DataSets, creating lookup lists, and generating LinqDataViews for databinding with the AsDataView() method. This ends with a tutorial that shows you how to copy LINQ query results to DataTables.
• "Manipulating Documents with LINQ to XML," describes one of LINQ most powerful capabilities: managing XML Infosets. This demonstrates that LINQ to XML has query and navigation capabilities that equal or surpasses XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0. It also shows LINQ to XML document transformation can replace XQuery and XSLT 1.0+ in the majority of common use cases. You learn how to use VB 9.0's XML literals to constructs XML documents, use GroupJoin() to produce hierarchical documents, and work with XML namespaces in C# and VB.
• "Exploring Third-Party and Emerging LINQ Implementations," describes Microsoft's Parallel LINQ (also called PLINQ) for taking advantage of multiple CPU cores in LINQ to Objects queries, LINQ to REST for translating LINQ queries into Representational State Transfer URLs that define requests to a Web service with the HTML GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE methods, and Bart De Smet's LINQ to Active Directory and LINQ to SharePoint third-party implementations.
• "Raising the Level of Data Abstraction with the Entity Data Model," starts with a guided tour of the development of EDM and EF as an O/RM tool and heir apparent to ADO.NET DataSets, provides a brief description of the entity-relationship (E-R) data model and diagrams, and then delivers a detailed analysis of EF architecture. Next comes an introduction to the Entity SQL (eSQL) language, eSQL queries, client views, and Object Services, including the ObjectContext, MetadataWorkspace, and ObjectStateManager. Later chapters describe eSQL and these objects in greater detail. Two C# and VB sample projects expand on the eSQL query and Object Services sample code.
• "Defining Conceptual, Mapping, and Storage Schema Layers," provides detailed insight into the structure of the *.edmx file that generates the *.ssdl (storage schema data language), *.msl (mapping schema language), and *.csdl files at runtime. You learn how to edit the *.edmx file manually to accommodate modifications that the graphic EDM Designer can’t handle. You learn how to implement the Table-per-Hierarchy (TPH) inheritance model and traverse the MetadataWorkspace to obtain property values. Four C# and VB sample projects demonstrate mapping, substituting stored procedures for queries, and TPH inheritance.
• "Introducing Entity SQL," examines EF's new eSQL dialect that adds keywords to address the differences between querying entities and relational tables. You learn to use Zlatko Michaelov's eBlast utility to write and analyze eSQL queries, then dig into differences between eSQL and T-SQL SELECT queries. (eSQL v1 doesn't support INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and ...