A First Look at ADO.NET and System XML v.2.0

Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1st edition (October 24, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0321228391
ISBN-13: 978-0321228390
Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.8 inches






Alex Homer is managing director of Stonebroom, Ltd., a software-development, consulting, and training organization. He was formerly lead technical author and reviewer for Wrox Press, specializing in Microsoft Web and database technologies Dave Sussman speaks frequently at Microsoft development conferences and has been writing about ASP since its earliest releases. Mark Fussell is a lead program manager at Microsoft, working on XML and Web service technologies. He designed the XML APIs in version 1.0 release of System.Xml in the .NET Framework and worked on the design of version 2.0 until the end of 2004. In this role, he helped define the future direction of XML and data access in the .NET Framework and within SQL Server 2005. Mark is now the program manager for the Web Services Enhancements (WSE) product, which enables developers to build advanced, secure, service-oriented applications within Visual Studio, based around the WS-* specifications. Fortunately, this still allows him to work with developers and the XML APIs in .NET, and to remain passionate about current and emerging XML technologies to integrate data across platforms--XML came, it saw, it integrated

At the simplest level, this book has two parts. The part on ADO.NET refers to further enhancements to accessing MS SQL Server on the .NET platform, as well as sundry bug fixes.

The other part concerns how .NET handles XML data management. Here Microsoft has put in a ton of work to handle the latest XML standards, including XML Schema, XPath and XQuery. The entire XML field has been growing rapidly and this book shows how Microsoft is keeping pace. Very reassuring.

Also, as one might expect, Microsoft has added custom enhancements to XML. There are two standard XML parsers, DOM and SAX, each with its well known advantages and disadvantages. With the SAX parser, you essentially add one of your routines to it as a listener for events you specify. Then you run SAX on an XML object. Via the listener, it pushes instances of those events to you. GUI building follows this approach. But some developers find this very awkward and unnatural. To answer this, Microsoft has come up with an "XMLReader" that reads XML objects and pull data into your code in a more intuitive way. Interesting, and this may be useful to some who are new to XML.

The book is more than just two disjoint halves. Basically, Microsoft is weaving the SQL access of ADO every more closely with XML, where the latter can be used as a data viewing language into the SQL. What about the impedance mismatch? Considerable effort has been expended to subsume this into low level details that more developers can ignore.

So for all these reasons, if you are already using .NET and SQL Server, you may want to check out these details more fully.

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