Availability

Table 26-1 lists some core Microsoft technologies that offer support for XML. There are too many products that use XML to list them all. (Some of these products are depicted in Figure 26-1.)

Table 26-1 Microsoft technologies that offer XML support.

Product	Description
Internet Explorer 5, Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft MSXML	MSXML is a Component Object Model (COM) dynamic-link library (DLL) containing an XML parser and DOM. Version 2 shipped in Internet Explorer 5, providing XML support to the browser in the form of XML data islands, XML data binding, and a built-in XML viewer using XSLT. Version 2.5 became part of the Windows 2000 platform and shipped in Microsoft Windows 98 Service Pack 2 (SP2) and Windows Millennium Edition (Me). Version 3, which has been developed further with Simple API for XML (SAX) and XSLT, is included in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and Microsoft Windows XP. MSXML 4 includes XSD support and is available for download on MSDN. (For more information, go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml)
Microsoft SQL Server 2000	SQL Server 2000 has built-in support for XML. It provides Open XML for XML support from within stored procedures. It also supplies Internet Information Services (IIS) extensions, so you can query or update the database either by using special URLs or by posting special XML-based queries and updates.
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) Toolkit	The SOAP toolkit was first developed and shipped as a software developer kit (SDK) on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN). Since that time, SOAP extensions for reliable messaging have been built into BizTalk Server and Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) 3.
Microsoft Exchange 2000	Exchange 2000 supports Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (DAV), which is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) XML standard. Exchange 2000 uses the MSXML parser mentioned previously.
.NET Framework	XML is a core part of the .NET Framework as shown by the following areas: The System.Xml namespace contains the core XML classes that support XML 1.0, DTDs, XDR, XSD, XPath, XSLT, and the DOM; it also has a new efficient way of reading and writing XML at the stream level (XmlReader/XmlWriter). The System.Xml.Serialization namespace together with a tool called "xsd.exe" provides support for compiling XML types into classes and then streaming XML into and out of those objects. The System.Data namespace contains some new XML-to-relational mapping capabilities in DataSet in conjunction with XmlDataDocument. System.Runtime.Serialization supports SOAP-based object remoting. System.Web.Services is fully XML-based. System.Resources contains a new XML resource format-.resx. System.Security uses an XML format for persisting custom security policies. System.Security.Cryptography.Xml provides support for XML Digital Signatures. System.Configuration manages .config files that are in an XML format.
Visual Studio .NET	C# itself supports a new XML-based commenting feature for providing program-level reference documentation. Visual Studio .NET provides a new IntelliSense-aware XML editor, and the XML Designer can generate XSD schemas. The new Visual Studio project files are also in an XML format. (For more information, go tohttp://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio.)
Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI)	UDDI is a new Web service provided by Microsoft and IBM that contains a registry for Web services; this enables programs to bind to Web-based services dynamically. (For more information, see http://uddi.microsoft.com.)
Microsoft Office XP	All versions of Office XP, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Access have new native support for importing and exporting XML data.