Visual Basic Blog

A group blog from members of the VB team

VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 7: Enumerating Large XML Files (Doug Rothaus)

VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 7: Enumerating Large XML Files (Doug Rothaus)It’s been a while since I wrote one of these XML cookbook entries. Here’s some info on a common problem: Really big XML files.I’m going to show you two things in this recipe. The first is a tip on reading very large XML files while still being able to use ...

VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 6: Writing an XSLT Transform in VB (Doug Rothaus)

Most XSLT programmers are familiar with this XSLT transform to copy an XML file. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">    <xsl:output method="xml" indent="yes"/>     <xsl:template match="@* | node()"> ...

VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 5: The “Halloween” Problem (Doug Rothaus)

In the last two XML cookbook entries, we talked about the technique of using the ReplaceWith method to perform an identity transform. While this technique may meet your needs, it can introduce a problem in your code commonly referred to as the “Halloween” problem. Let’s take a look at what the problem is, and how to solve it. (For ...

VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 4: Get Inner XML from the Nodes Property (Doug Rothaus)

Recipe 3 showed one way to work with mixed XML content using the XML Descendant axis property and the ReplaceWith method. This is one way to do an identity transform and we’ll look at another method in a later post. There is a key capability not mentioned in Recipe 3 that you will need for fully-functioning identity transforms. That is ...

VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 3: Identity Transforms (Doug Rothaus)

An identity transform in XSLT does just what the name implies: replace the identity of an element or attribute with a new identity. Identity transforms are especially critical when dealing with XML markup that is less rigid in its structure. Consider a documentation structure for news articles. Whenever a title is referred to within an article...

VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 2: Descendants and Ancestors (Doug Rothaus)

This entry in the cookbook shows how you can access descendant and ancestor elements in an XML document using Visual Basic, XML Axis properties, and LINQ to XML objects.DescendantsVisual Basic provides XML Axis properties that enable you to easily refer to child nodes and attributes. As is often the case with XML, you may need to reference sub...

VB XML Cookbook, Recipe 1: XML Transformations using XML Literals (Doug Rothaus)

I was working on a blog entry about replacing XSLT transforms with Visual Basic XML Literals. As the entry progressed, I noticed that it was really, really long. So, Avner Aharoni and I talked things over and we decided to break it up into multiple entries and start a series, much like the LINQ Cookbook that was started a few months back. ...