August .NET Users Group Meeting

The topic for this month's Kansas City .NET User Group meeting was "Introduction to System.Xml and Web Services" and the presenter was Microsoft MVP in XML, Jeff Julian. He's the creator of the .NET Book Club and hosts the blogging system Geekswithblogs.net.

Some highlights (Microsoft propaganda?) from the meeting. I forgot my notebook so they're from memory.

• Microsoft is deprecating XSLT in favor of XQuery. System.Xml.Xsl is going to be marked as obsolete in .NET 2.0 and will return warning messages when its used.
• XmlDocument and the XML DOM are also being deprecated in favor of improved XML streaming techniques that will allow editing not just appending to the end of the stream.
• SAX is bad because its Java and its old. (See what I mean about the propaganda?)
  
• He demonstrated using XmlDocument, XPathNavigator, XmlReader, XmlWriter, and used a web service to demonstrate XML serialization.

I ran into former co-workers Galen and Derrick Vidacak at the meeting and had a good time talking to Derrick for a while after the meeting.