XML is not as popular as it once was, but there's still a lot of XML based configuration and data floating around today. Today I ran into a recurring issue where I needed to convert a string to a properly encoded XML string. Seems simple enough but it's not as straightforward as you might think to generate an XML Encoded string properly. This post shows a few different ways to retrieve a string and discusses advantages of each.

If you've ever tried to generate an XML document from content that contains lower ASCII characters you might have found out that this will throw exceptions. Here's why this happens and how you can work around the issue in a pinch.

A couple of weeks back I have been working on a Web Service client tool for COM clients. With the SOAP Toolkit DOA one of the things that old (for me most FoxPro apps of clients) apps need to do is access Web Services and .NET is really become the only viable option if calling a complex service is required. I’ve been swamped with work in this area recently (which isn’t a bad thing) but clearly a...

If you're generating XML content that gets sent out to HTTP you'll need to watch out for the default XmlTextWriter encoding which includes a byte order mark. Including a BOM in Http output effectively produces invalid XML and while a smart XML client will skip over the BOM, others will barf on the BOM and treat it as content.

When creating digital signatures of XML documents its crucial that the Xml document settings on signing match the document settings that are expected for validating signatures. I ran into a problem where our signatures were failing with a vendor's site, due to the PreserveWhitespace property settings on our end and on the vendor's parser being mismatched.

Signing an XML document and then validating the digital signature of the document doesn't involve a lot of code - once you know how it works, but arriving there is quite the journey. This post describes setting up a certifcate for testing, signing an XML document with the Private key and then validating it with the Public key.

In the ResX exporter for my data driven Resource Provider I use a bit of code that iterates over the database resources and then spits out ResX resources from the data as an option to get your resources into your Web site. The code I've used in this stretch of code uses an XmlWriter to quickly spit...

I've been working on XML Parsing for a few weeks now and in the process got to know the XPathNavigator a bit better than I did. Here are a few notes and some helpers that I used to simplify my parsing.

When using an XmlWriter to generate output to anything but files you'll want to be careful of the Byte Order Marks that get generated by default.

I'm doing some work with OFX financial data parsing and I'm finding that there's not a lot of information on doing this and a number of problems with getting the OFX schemas to work properly with .NET. With some help I was able to get .NET types from the OFX schemas but the data is ugly as sin on these generated types. So I'm looking for insight if anybody's been down that path.

I've run into a snag trying to import a schema that includes a bunch of related schemas. When running XSD.EXE it fails to see the related schemas and bombs because of it.