If you're like most Web developers, when you were first learning HTML, you probably spent a great deal of your time playing around with your browser. The fact that you could simply do a "View Source" and see how an interesting web page was implemented was one of the things that helped HTML catch on so quickly. This "code sharing" is undoubtably one of the reasons the Web was able to grow as quickly as it did.
Unfortunately, these days it's not so easy to take a look at the magic going on behind the scenes of the average web page. With the emphasis on usability and appearance, the previously simple HTML has become incresingly difficult to read and these days most web pages are made up of a combination of several files and use often use as much CSS and client-side script as they do HTML. Using "View Source" simply doesn't cut it anymore. Luckily Microsoft has realized this fact and is building a tool to help developers analyze these increasingly complex web documents. It's called the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. In this article I'll give you a quick introduction to this powerful new tool and examine some of it's most useful features.
These features enable you to:
1 Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
2 Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.
3 Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
4 View HTML object class names, ID's, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
5 Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
6 Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS Web feed links.
7 Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
8 Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
9 Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
10 Choose direct links to W3C specification references, the Internet Explorer team weblog (blog), and other resources.
11 Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages.
12 Find the style rules used to set specific style values on an element.
13 View the formatted and syntax colored source of HTML and CSS.
Download the beta version from here - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e59c3964-672d-4511-bb3e-2d5e1db91038&displaylang=en
Check for details on IE developer tool here - http://www.15seconds.com/issue/070208.htm
- D
2> /// auto generated code from xsd command ran above...using System.Xml.Serialization;
[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlRootAttribute(Namespace="", IsNullable=false)]
public class Contact
{ public ContactInfo;
}
public class ContactInfo
{ public string Code;
public string FirstName;
public string LastName;
public string Email;
}
3> Now, we could save an contact XML data to this class using this simple function:
public Contact ContactObject(string xml)
{ StringReader stream = null;
XmlTextReader reader = null;
try
{ // serialise to object
XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Contact));
stream = new StringReader(xml); // read xml data
reader = new XmlTextReader(stream); // create reader
// covert reader to object
return (Contact)serializer.Deserialize(reader);
}
}
And to get the XML based on the Contact class object, use the following function:
public string ContactXML(Contact cont)
{ MemoryStream stream = null;
TextWriter writer = null;
try
{ stream = new MemoryStream();
// read xml in memory
writer = new StreamWriter(stream, Encoding.Unicode) ;
// get serialise object
XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Contact));
serializer.Serialize(writer, cont);
// read object
int count = (int) stream.Length;
// saves object in memory stream
byte[] arr = new byte[count];
stream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
// copy stream contents in byte array
stream.Read(arr, 0, count);
UnicodeEncoding utf = new UnicodeEncoding();
// convert byte array to string
return utf.GetString(arr).Trim();
}
}
Hope this helps for all working on XML!
Thanks - DJ