Microsoft .NET introduces a new suite of XML APIs built on industry standards such as DOM, XPath, XSD, and XSLT. The .NET Framework XML classes also include innovations that offer convenience, better performance, and a more familiar programming model, tightly coupled with the new .NET data access APIs-ADO.NET. XmlWriter, XmlReader, and XmlNavigator classes and classes that derive from them, including XMLTextReader and XMLTextWriter, encapsulate a number of functionalities that previously had to be accomplished manually. A discussion of the XMLDOM-Document is also included. Aaron Skonnard

Digital dashboards gather information and functionalities from a wide variety of sources ranging from Web pages to applications such as Microsoft Outlook and SQL Server, and present the resulting information in a single user interface. Digital dashboards built with the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit (DDRK) are made up of distinct units called Web Parts. Web Parts, introduced with the DDRK 2.01, can contain any Web-based information, are reusable, and integrate with each other and with other dashboards. Creating Web Parts and getting them to work together is illustrated via a sample application that uses a PivotTable view. Integrating Web Parts with Outlook, the Outlook View control, storage, and debugging are also covered. Maarten Mullender

This article provides an overview of writing applications for Windows CE 3.0. Unicode support in Windows CE, the kernel, memory management, the object store, and COM and DCOM are discussed. The article also covers the user interface, graphics, the Internet, and how Windows CE compares to the desktop in each of these areas. eMbedded Visual Tools 3.0 is discussed in depth. To help the reader decide which tools to use, development with Visual Basic, Win32, MFC, and ATL are explained. Text editor samples with this article have been developed with Visual Basic and Win32 so their implementations can be compared. Paul Yao

A Global Positioning System (GPS) device captures lots of interesting information that can be used in many ways. This article presents a custom application built with Visual Basic that collects data from a GPS satellite and charts the course of a user relative to the satellite. Such an application is obviously well suited for use on a handheld PC and porting the original application to eMbedded Visual Basic for Windows CE is described. The differences between Visual Basic and eMbedded Visual Basic, such as support for specific control and data types, are explained. Tips for dealing with reduced screen real estate on a handheld PC, debugging, and running in an emulator are also discussed. Joshua Trupin

The XML Wrapper template described in this article transforms XML documents into Visual Basic classes, hiding the more complex parts of using the Microsoft XML parser. Developers who have little knowledge of XML or the Microsoft XML parser can use classes created with the template, thus making it easier to use XML in their projects. This article describes the template, shows classes in a sample application based on the template, and explains how to customize those classes to support repeating child elements. Although this project is illustrated using Visual Basic 6.0, the technique can be extended for use with other versions of Visual Basic and with other languages. Dave Grundgeiger and Patrick Escarcega

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