Chapter 14. XML on the Client

All the technologies and programming interfaces we’ve looked at up to now work regardless of the surrounding environment—be it the Microsoft Windows desktop, an MS-DOS console, or a Web server. As long as the Microsoft .NET Framework is available, XML-based code works just fine. When you move on to Web applications, however, things change a little bit. Using XML on the client side of a Web application poses a few extra problems and affects the browsers you can use.

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to embed XML data in the body of server-side generated HTML pages and how to access that data using script code on the client. To do this, you don’t need managed code or the XML classes of the .NET Framework. We’ll also investigate a little-used feature of the .NET Framework and Component Object Model (COM) interaction and import a Windows Forms application into an HTML page as a special type of Microsoft ActiveX control. Finally, we’ll review the possible ways to make the embedded Windows Forms application access the XML data nested in the same HTML page.

To use this chapter’s Web applications included with the book’s sample files, follow this procedure: