Subtitles of the Movie

Now that you've seen just a real brief look and description of XML, let's talk about .NET and XML and how these two fit together. .NET is by and large XML dependent: a lot of the communication that it does is based on the XML format. You'll notice in .NET that the configuration files are in XML format, so there's a lot of things where .NET and XML have embraced one another. Web services is one of the areas that I personally feel like this is one of the main reasons that you've seen the acceptance of .NET out there that everybody was so skeptical about. I know the non-Microsoft folks, when .NET first came out they were calling it names like not yet and so forth. And a lot of those folks took a look at web services and how they have been built and executed in .NET. And the simplicity of them really makes this useful, and this has really done a lot to gain a lot of people's attention, and kind of win them over to the .NET camp. So XML is one of those things you need to get to know and again I tell my students in the live classes, get yourself an XML book, and stop wasting that time between midnight and four every night. I know what it is like, I know what you are thinking - yeah sure I'll just grab a book and you know read it in all that extra spare time I've got. But believe me it is worth it. XML is ever expanding universe, I would direct you out to www.w3c.org and you will see out there, there is lot of things cropping up around XML. First of all you just have the basic XML language. I do want to point out this thing is case sensitive, it is extremely picky. HTML has raised a lot of us up to be very, very lazy programmers. If we skip tags in HTML, it will fix it for us, we'll ignore our problems and so forth. XML is not so - if it is not well formed and valid it simply will not run. XSLT is the way to take an existing XML document and transform it, that's, thus the T part of that XSL. And this that we can transform one document totally into another one, based on conditions, matches and so forth and you'll see that out in the world wide web consortium. XML-schema tells us how a document is to be organized; for example if I have a part number I should have a price, you know that sort of thing, to tell us if the document is well formed: if all the elements are there that are supposed to be there, that need to be there. There is a lot of issues on XML and I will not go into all of them right here. Just suffice to say XML is here to stay, it is vital part of .NET, you need to be familiar with it, if you are not it will be well worth your while to go to your local book store, grab a book, again I always encourage folks. Most of the book stores out there now have the little coffee shops, grab a cup of coffee, pull two to three of XML books down off the shelves, and read a chapter out of each one and see which one has an author who has your learning style, who speaks the language you can readily understand. Then buy that book and go home and begin to familiarize yourself with XML. Now one thing I will warn you about, in the next videos we are going to talk about web services, and Microsoft did a good job of abstracting most of this away from you. Now while that is cool you do need to know what is going on in the .NET to make XML work the way it does for these web services. So with that let's move on to the web services video and take a look at the power of web services.