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Articles and Tutorials
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Coordinate system, can't live without it
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Category: General
Date: Mon, Jun 30, 2003 |
| Excerpt from the book: Learn SVG. The SVG document provides us with a default coordinate system - the initial User Coordinate System. With this user coordinate system comes along a plane 2D-space. This canvas is theoretically infinite in both dimensions. To specify a point on the canvas, we also need to have a unit measure affiliated to each coordinate axis. SVG provides us with initial User Units. Initially one user unit is equal to the size of one pixel. We know, that a pixel (picture element) is the smallest visible point of a raster graphics device. Consequently, the coordinates, and so the position and size of graphic elements, are device and resolution dependent. |
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XPath for .NET Developers
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Category: .NET
Date: Mon, May 12, 2003 |
XML Path Language (or XPath) is a W3C standard that primarily allows identifying parts of an XML document. This means that if you have an XML document and would like to locate one or more nodes, you can use XPath to do that. In addition, XPath is also used for numerical calculations, string manipulations, testing boolean conditions, etc.
In this article, you'll learn about XPath and how to use it in .NET applications. The Microsoft .NET Framework supports XPath 1.0 W3C recommendation. The classes in System.Xml and System.Xml.XPath namespaces allow executing XPath queries and working with the result sets. Before we look at these classes and examples, let's first review XPath basic concepts and terminology. |
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Microsoft InfoPath 2003 By Example
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Category: General
Date: Sun, Apr 20, 2003 |
On October 9, 2002, Microsoft announced a new Office application, code-named "XDocs". Built from the ground up to work natively with XML, XDocs enables creation of forms that can be easily integrated with Web services, databases, XML and any XML-enabled system, such as BizTalk Server. XDocs was later renamed as Microsoft InfoPath 2003.
Enterprises can now easily create rich and dynamic forms using the WYSIWYG interface provided by InfoPath. The native format for data storage in InfoPath is XML, and hence the information gathered using InfoPath forms can be very easily integrated with virtually any backend system that can understand and work with XML.
In this two-part article series, I’ll show you how to create a sample InfoPath forms application. This sample application will allow employees to submit TimeOff requests, and managers can then approve/reject the request. The primary goal behind this sample application is to illustrate how easy it is to create a rich InfoPath form that communicates with XML Web services. |
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ASP.NET Web Services Techniques
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Category: SOAP and Web Services
Date: Sun, Apr 13, 2003 |
In this article, you'll learn about the following ASP.NET Web Services concepts:
- Working with SOAP Headers
- Asynchronous Web Services Clients
- SOAP Faults
- Passing Binary Data
- Session and Application State Management
- Caching
- Hooking into HTTP Pipeline
- WSDL.exe and web.config Tips
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XML to PDF using XSL-FO
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Category: General
Date: Sun, Mar 30, 2003 |
In day-to-day life, we often make use of printed material – textbooks, manuals, contracts, catalogs, newspaper, magazines, and brochures. Producing high-quality print documents requires ability to do pagination, generating table of contents and index, headers and footers, margins, multi-column output, odd/even page masters, footnotes, endnotes, floats, fonts, leading, word spacing, highlighting and so on.
If the content is stored in XML format, and you need to compose high-quality print and online pages, that has above mentioned features (such as pagination), you can make use of W3C specification, known as, XSL Formatting Objects or XSL-FO (also known as XSLFO or just XSL). |
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Information Modeling with XML
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Category: General
Date: Mon, Mar 24, 2003 |
| When XML first came into use, it was seen primarily as a data interchange standard. Since then it has come to be used for more and more things — even serving as the core for development and deployment platforms such as Microsoft’s .NET. Increasingly, XML has become the means to model components of information systems, and those components automatically construct themselves around what has been expressed in XML. This represents the real potential of XML — the ability to model the behavior of an entire application in XML once, instead of repeatedly in different ways for each component of an application program. |
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Working with XML-based Configuration Files
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Category: General
Date: Sat, Mar 1, 2003 |
XML-formatted files are fast becoming the preferred method of saving the configuration settings. The reasons for this include ease of parsing and processing, ability to transform (for instance to generate HTML report from the config settings), extensibility, and so on.
The .NET Framework provides System.Configuration namespace, which contains various classes to work with XML-based configuration files.
However, if you are working on a non-.NET application and need to use XML-based configuration files, this article contains a C++ class that will make your life easier. The class CConfigurationSettings allows loading local XML file, XML string, or remote XML file over HTTP. The methods allow getting and setting "standard" and "custom" configuration values; and persisting the configuration changes. The class also supports namespaces. |
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Common XSLT Tasks – Part I (Transformation and Sorting)
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Category: General
Date: Sun, Feb 23, 2003 |
XSLT is a W3C specification (www.w3.org/TR/xslt), a declarative language, designed to transform a well-formed XML document into any other text format, such as XML, HTML, WML, SVG, and so on.
XSLT supports the notion of "separating content from the presentation". Once content/data is available in XML document, various XSLT stylesheets can be used with the same XML document, to generate different outputs. XSLT processor then can be used to apply the XSLT stylesheet on the XML document. Popular XSLT processors include MSXML from Microsoft, Saxon by Michael Kay, Xalan by Apache, and Oracle XSLT processor.
In this five-part article series, we'll present examples that illustrate some common XSLT tasks such as transforming XML, sorting, generating nodes, conditions and looping, recursion, and so on.
In this first part, we'll see examples of transforming XML and sorting. |
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Working with XML in .NET – Part I
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Category: .NET
Date: Sun, Feb 16, 2003 |
The XML support in .NET is provided via five namespaces, System.Xml, System.Xml.XPath, System.Xml.Xsl, System.Xml.Schema, and System.Xml.Serialization. These namespaces are part of the System.Xml.dll assembly. The classes in these namespaces are designed to support XML 1.0, XML Namespaces, XPath, XSLT, DOM, and XSD Schema W3C standards. The .NET Framework does not support SAX, instead supports a different, "pull" based streaming API.
In this article you'll learn about basics of XML processing in .NET. More specifically, this article includes Visual Basic .NET, C# .NET, and C++ .NET code examples to illustrate:
- writing XML,
- parsing XML,
- manipulating XML,
- querying XML,
- transforming XML,
- validating XML, and
- serializing XML.
For simplicity, most of the applications presented in this article are console applications.
In this first part, we'll see examples of creating XML documents from scratch.
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