Which XML-related technologies I have to learn? (C# centric)

Question

At my work as developer I do a lot of XML writing and parsing using C#. I have read very little about XAML, XSLT and XML schemas at Wikipedia and I don't see if they would make my XML-driven coding easier. Should I study any of these technologies? Which of them? Any other?

Answer 1

They are all different.

• XAML is an example of data stored in xml (same as xhtml, etc), used in WCF/WPF/Silverlight etc
• XSLT is a declarative transformation language
• XML schemas (XSD) define valid xml

Each have different use-cases, and all are useful for different scenarios. XSD is worth knowing as it allows you to author valid xml documents, for example.

Answer 2

They are all useful, and it depends on the applications you work on, but for me, XML Schema is crucial. It lets you define, more than does DTD, the structure of what your XML Documents should look like. You can define more detailed restrictions on what values elements and attributes can have, and you can easily validate an XML Document against the Schema. Another key thing with Schema, is all the language bindings it has. You can compile your Schema into Java or C++ using JAXB or CodeSynthesis respectively. This lets you not have to deal with any XML tags on your own, just data structures.