Introduction

A common task for a developer working for a large business is to build and connect applications that process data. The data could be generated by an application which was working in a production environment for years and sometimes it is really difficult to connect one application to another because any change in working code can ruin the production environment.

In such a situation the easiest solution to implement is a new tier between two applications which gets data from one application and converts it to a format acceptable by the other one.

The most widely distributed format for data in modern applications is XML and it is a must for any developer to have a good understanding of XML principles and XML-related technologies. But inside the application a developer works with simple types and objects. (Of course, when using the Microsoft .NET  platform developers deals only with objects because even "simple types" such as Integer, String or Boolean are objects). Serialization comes into play to represent XML data as objects and vice versa. To make sure that data comes in the necessary format, validation against XML schema can be used.

When an application should only receive data in one format and convert it to another it is not necessary to deserialize objects from XML and then XML transformations (XSLT) comes into play. In this article I would like to show a sample project that uses these technologies.