XML and Web Services for Microsoft Developers - Part 1

Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 4.0 was the first Web browser to support XML. Since then XML support has been introduced in various Microsoft products, such as Office XP and SQL Server 2000. Microsoft re-assured its commitment by including extensive support for XML in the .NET framework.

Keeping up with evolution of XML family of standards, Microsoft products support various other specifications, such as XPath, XSLT, XML Schemas, DOM, SAX, SOAP and Web services. This recent ZDNet story declared Microsoft as one of the winners in the Web services market and mentioned that "Microsoft is establishing strong position in the developing Web services market".

Considering these facts, if you're a developer who works on Microsoft platform, building Web or Windows applications, it's crucial that you understand the usage and applications of XML, and know about the level of XML support offered in various Microsoft products and SDKs.

The goal of this tutorial is to provide you with a complete picture of XML and Web services support made available in varied Microsoft products. More specifically we'll discuss the following offerings:

• MSXML or Microsoft XML Core Services
• XML and Internet Explorer
• SQL Server 2000 XML or SQLXML
• SOAP Toolkit
• .NET Framework
• Web Services Toolkits (Office XP and Exchange Server)
• BizTalk Server
• Other tools and SDKs

In this first part, we'll explore MSXML, Data Islands, SQLXML, and SOAP Toolkit. In the second part of this tutorial we'll focus on .NET Framework and Web Services.

This tutorial makes the assumption that you are familiar with XML family of standards. If you're not, read SitePoint's Introduction to XML.

Let's get started and talk about what is MSXML and how to use it in your Web and/or desktop applications.

Microsoft XML Core Services

As mentioned earlier, Internet Explorer 4.0 was the first browser to support XML. With IE 4.0, Microsoft provided a COM DLL named msxml.dll, a basic DOM (Document Object Model) implementation that allowed creating and parsing XML documents. Over years, Microsoft has greatly enhanced this COM-based free XML parsing API, and added support for various other XML standards.

MSXML, now known as Microsoft XML Core Services, is the paramount XML processing API available on Microsoft platform. In additions to DOM parsing, it also supports various other standards such as SAX, XPath, XSLT, XML Schemas and XML namespaces. MSXML SDK is shipped with various products such as Internet Explorer, Office XP, etc., and also can be downloaded from the MSDN Website at http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml. The current Internet Explorer 6.0 release ships MSXML version 3.0 SP2. And the latest MSXML version available is MSXML 4.0 SP1 that you can download from the MSDN site mentioned earlier.

MSXML can be used to:

• Create, parse, navigate and update XML document using DOM or SAX API,
• Transform XML documents (XSLT),
• Extract data (XPath),
• Validate XML documents using DTD, XDR , XML Schemas (XSD), and
• HTTP data access (XMLHTTP and ServerXMLHTTP)

The Microsoft site also has complete details on the standards supported by MSXML.

In the following section, we'll look at examples on how to use MSXML on the server-side in an ASP page, and on the client-side in a Visual Basic application. Let's begin with an ASP page example.