XML Tools in Visual Studio
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that provides a format for describing data. This facilitates more precise declarations of content and more meaningful search results across multiple platforms. In addition, XML enables the separation of presentation from data. For example, in HTML you use tags to tell the browser to display data as bold or italic; in XML you use tags only to describe data, such as city name, temperature, and barometric pressure. In XML you use style sheets such as Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) and cascading style sheets (CSS) to present the data in a browser. XML separates the data from the presentation and the process, enabling you to display and process the data as you wish, by applying different style sheets and applications.
XML is a subset of SGML that is optimized for delivery over the Web. It is defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This standardization ensures that structured data will be uniform and independent of applications or vendors.
XML is at the core of many features of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. The topic list below names the tools and features related to XML that are offered in Visual Studio and the .NET Framework.
For more information, see the XML Developer Center (http://msdn.Microsoft.com/xml), which provides the latest documentation, technical information, downloads, newsgroups, and other resources for XML developers.
In This Section
- Working with XML Data
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Discusses the role of XML in the way data is handled in Visual Studio.
- Debugging XSLT
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Discusses how to use the Visual Studio debugger to debug XSLT.
- XML Schema Designer (XML Designer)
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Discusses how to create and edit XML schema files
Reference
- XML Standards Reference
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Provides information on the XML technologies including, XML, Document Type Definition (DTD), XML Schema definition language (XSD), and XSLT.
- System.XML
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Describes the classes and other elements that make up the System.XML namespace and provides links to more detailed information on each item.
- System.XML.Serialization
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Describes the classes and other elements that make up the System.XML.Serialization namespace and provides links to more detailed information on each item.