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XML Tools in Visual Studio

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that provides a format for describing data. This facilitates more precise declarations of content and more meaningful search results across multiple platforms. In addition, XML enables the separation of presentation from data. For example, in HTML you use tags to tell the browser to display data as bold or italic; in XML you use tags only to describe data, such as city name, temperature, and barometric pressure. In XML you use style sheets such as Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) and cascading style sheets (CSS) to present the data in a browser. XML separates the data from the presentation and the process. This enables you to display and process the data as you want to, by applying different style sheets and applications.

XML is a subset of SGML that is optimized for delivery over the Web. It is defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This standardization guarantees that structured data will be uniform and independent of applications or vendors.

XML is at the core of many features of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. The following topic list names the tools and features related to XML that are offered in Visual Studio and the .NET Framework.

For more information, see the XML Developer Center, which provides the latest documentation, technical information, downloads, newsgroups, and other resources for XML developers.

In This Section

  • Working with XML Data
    Discusses the role of XML in the way data is handled in Visual Studio.

  • Debugging XSLT
    Provides links to topics about using the Visual Studio debugger to debug XSLT.

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