Here are few suggestion I got from my friends and communities:

1. XML Diff Patch - Couldn’t achieve what I wanted.
2. Linq for XML -  I cannot use this as the application is developed under .net Framework 2.0

So after Several Discussions and Forum Posts I Decided to Write one on my own. I don’t know whether it is the best, but it servers for my purpose. so just thought of sharing it with you all, as I saw there were a lot with the same problem. I know  it needs some improvements such as comparing nested nodes and attributes. but  this would be a better kick start. "something is better than nothing" right!!!.

Here are two sample XML files which we can use for our comparison, and the output expected.

Existing Settings

<Properties xmlns:xsi=http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance

 xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
    <Property Name="PerformanceType1" ProID="1" Text="Gross"

 Type="ddlb" Values="On|Off">On</Property>
    <Property Name="Benchmark1" ProID="3" Text="Benchmark 1" Type="ddlb"

 Values="N/A|2nd Security Index">N/A</Property>
    <Property Name="Benchmark2" ProID="4" Text="Benchmark 2" Type="ddlb"

 Values="N/A|2nd Security Index">N/A</Property>
    <Property Name="Region1" ProID="7" Text="Column 1" Type="ddlb" 

Values="N/A|1 Month|2 Month|3">1 Month</Property>
    <Property Name="FromDate1" ProID="8" Text="Column 1 From" 

Type="Date">N/A</Property>
    <Property Name="FromDate9" ProID="24" Text="Column 9 From" 

Type="Date">N/A</Property>
</Properties>

New Settings

<Properties xmlns:xsi=http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance 

xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
    <Property Name="PerformanceType1" ProID="1" Text="Gross"

 Type="ddlb" Values="On|Off">On</Property>
    <Property Name="Benchmark1" ProID="3" Text="Benchmark 1" 

Type="ddlb" Values="N/A|2nd Security Index">changed</Property>
    <Property Name="Benchmark2" ProID="4" Text="Benchmark 2" 

Type="ddlb" Values="N/A|2nd Security Index">N/A</Property>
    <Property Name="Region1" ProID="9" Text="Changed" 

Type="ddlb" Values="N/A|1 Month|2 Month|3">1 Month</Property>
    <Property Name="NewData" ProID="29" Text="Column 9 From" 

Type="Date">NewlyAdded</Property>
    <Property Name="FromDate9" ProID="24" Text="Column 9 From" 

Type="Date">N/A</Property>
</Properties>

Expected Output

<Properties xmlns:xsi=http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance

 xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
    <Property Name="PerformanceType1" ProID="1" Text="Gross" 

Type="ddlb" Values="On|Off">On</Property>
    <Property Name="Benchmark1" ProID="3" Text="Benchmark 1"

 Type="ddlb" Values="N/A|2nd Security Index">N/A</Property>
    <Property Name="Benchmark2" ProID="4" Text="Benchmark 2"

 Type="ddlb" Values="N/A|2nd Security Index">N/A</Property>
    <Property Name="Region1" ProID="9" Text="Changed"

 Type="ddlb" Values="N/A|1 Month|2 Month|3">1 Month</Property>
    <Property Name="FromDate9" ProID="24" Text="Column 9 From"

 Type="Date">N/A</Property>
    <Property Name="NewData" ProID="29" Text="Column 9 From"

 Type="Date">NewlyAdded</Property>
</Properties>

And now Lets see how the code works:

string original = File.ReadAllText(@"<Original File path>");
string New = File.ReadAllText(@"<New File path>");
XmlCompare compare = new XmlCompare();
XmlDocument docs=compare.compare(original, New);
File.WriteAllText(@"<output path>", docs.OuterXml);

The Implementation of the code and its functionality is given in the below download file, with inline comments.

Please note few values are hard coded in this class, but can be altered to suit the requirements.

XMLCompare.cs

I hope it helps for a kick start!.

1. Silverlight - Hello World
2. Silverlight - Anatomy of an Application
3. Silverlight - The VS Environment
4. Silverlight - Content Controls
5. Silverlight - Built-In Controls
6. Silverlight - Width, Height, Margins, Padding, Alignment
7. Silverlight - Using a GridSplitter
8. Silverlight - Grid Layout
9. Silverlight - StackPanel Layout
10. Silverlight - Canvas Layout
11. Silverlight - Databinding UI to .NET Classes
12. Silverlight - Simple Styles
13. Silverlight - Custom Types in XAML
14. Silverlight - Binding with Conversion
15. Silverlight - List Based Data Binding
16. Silverlight - Simple User Control
17. Silverlight - Templating a Button
18. Silverlight - Resources from XAP/DLL/Site Of Origin
19. Silverlight - Animations & Storyboards
20. Silverlight - Uploads with WebClient
21. Silverlight - Downloads with WebClient
22. Silverlight - Calling HTTPS Web Services
23. Silverlight - Calling Web Services
24. Silverlight - Making Cross Domain Requests
25. Silverlight - Using HttpWebRequest
26. Silverlight - File Dialogs and User Files
27. Silverlight - Using Sockets
28. Silverlight - Using Isolated Storage
29. Silverlight - .NET Code Modifying HTML
30. Silverlight - Using Isolated Storage Quotas
31. Silverlight - Calling JavaScript from .NET
32. Silverlight - Evaluating JavaScript from .NET Code
33. Silverlight - Handling HTML Events in .NET Code
34. Silverlight - Handling .NET Events in JavaScript
35. Silverlight - Calling .NET from JavaScript
36. Silverlight - Displaying a Custom Splash Screen
37. Silverlight - Passing Parameters from your Web Page
38. Silverlight - Loading Media at Runtime
39. Silverlight - Dynamically Loading Assemblies/Code
40. Silverlight - Reading/Writing XML
41. Silverlight - Multiple Threads with BackgroundWorker
42. Silverlight - Insert/Update/Delete with the DataGrid
43. Silverlight - Getting Started with the DataGrid
44. Silverlight - Embedding Custom Fonts

Thats it!. Have  a great weekend!!.

1. How To Use ADO.NET to Retrieve and Modify Records in an Excel Workbook With Visual Basic .NET
2. DataSet to Excel in Two steps – with Different Styles- by Krishna_accent
3. And finally comes our good old CSV files.

the first one seems to be ok. but have little more work to be done on coding. the second is a  really good one, but again we need excel to be installed, which again run out of our needs.

using CSV is ok for unformatted Comma Separated Values.

But Recently I found Carlos Aguilar Mares has this wonderful FREE component called ExcelXmlWriter , to export data to excel. it doesn’t need excel to be installed and it can be used to generate formatted excel workbooks with very few lines of code.

   1:  using CarlosAg.ExcelXmlWriter;

   2:   

   3:  class TestApp {

   4:      static void Main(string[] args) {

   5:          Workbook book = new Workbook();

   6:          Worksheet sheet = book.Worksheets.Add("Sample");

   7:          WorksheetRow row =  sheet.Table.Rows.Add();

   8:          row.Cells.Add("Hello World");

   9:          book.Save(@"c:\test.xls");

  10:      }

  11:  }

the download has a very easy to understand help file explaining how to use this. you can download it in his website here.

Clean and simple isn’t it ?

Here is a little introduction about PDFSharp:

• PDFsharp is the Open Source library that easily creates PDF documents from any .NET language.
  The same drawing routines can be used to create PDF documents, draw on the screen, or send output to any printer.
• It can use either GDI+ or WPF.
• It includes support for Unicode in PDF files.
• It also includes MigraDoc Lite which brings you all the high-level functionality not included in PDFsharp.

Using PDFSharp is very simple. the samples in the official download file are more than enough to learn the functionality of PDFSharp.here is a little piece of code I used to merge A collection of PDFs in a folder to a single PDF file.

   1:  PdfDocument inputDocument=

   2:                  PdfReader.Open(file.FullName,PdfDocumentOpenMode.Import);

   3:  int count = inputDocument.PageCount;

   4:    for (int idx = 0; idx < count; idx++)

   5:     {

   6:         // Get the page from the external document...

   7:         PdfPage page = inputDocument.Pages[idx];

   8:         // ...and add it to the output document.

   9:         outputDocument.AddPage(page);

  10:     }

  11:  

  12:  outputDocument.Save(filename);

if you want to download the full sample I created download it  here.

if you want to download pdfSharp Library visit the site below:

http://www.pdfsharp.com/PDFsharp

And this Starter Kit Show case includes an awsum MSDN Reader. The MSDN Reader allows you to browse through MSDN Magazine articles like never before. Read through articles, view figures and code snippets in an intuitive and easy-to-use experience. The complete source code for the reader is also provided for us to download here.

Its totally free. and I would say its a must have for we developers. so what are you waiting for install it!

Download it here
Source Code
Syndication Starter Kit home

so I decided to help them all out, but I don’t want to fill the blogsphere with another post of LINQ, WPF or WCF, because its already filled with a lot of articles on them by geek’s and various people around the world.so what I’m going to do is post some valuable links on where you can give a kick start on learning these.

1. To get visual studio 2008 read the post here.
2. The first and best place I would recommend to learn is reading Scott Guthrie’s web blog. he had written some excellent articles on these new technologies. I would recommend you to subscribe his blogs feeds or book marking his blog for future reference. here is are some valuable articles by him.
   1. Using LINQ with ASP.Net in VS 2008.
   2. Scott Guthrie - First Look at ORCAS.
   3. New “ORCAS” C# 3.0 Language Features: Automatic Properties, Object Initializers and Collection Initializers.
   4. New “ORCAS” Language Features : Extension Methods.
   5. New “ORCAS” Language Features : Lambda Expressions.
   6. New “ORCAS” Language Features : Query Syntax.
   7. New “ORCAS” Language Features : Anonymous Types.
   8. and the following are Scott’s posts on LINQ
      • • Part 1: Introduction to LINQ to SQL
        • Part 2: Defining our Data Model Classes
        • Part 3: Querying our Database
        • Part 4: Updating our Database
        • Part 5: Binding UI using the ASP:LinqDataSource Control
        • Part 6: Retrieving Data Using Stored Procedures
        • Part 7: Updating our Database using Stored Procedures
        • Part 8: Executing Custom SQL Expressions
        • Part 9: Using a Custom LINQ Expression with the Control
3. Another Place to Learn About LINQ is LINQ in Action . this site with its popularity has been written as a book also for more information visit here.
4. And now for WPF. here are the web sites which helped me to build my WPF knowledge.
   1. Windows Client official web site WPF Video Tutorials
   2. The Content Presenter
   3. The WPF Blog
5. And so far to lean Silverlight would recommend the official Silverlight web site.
6. and below are some more links which you might be interested in:
   1. Parallel Language Integrated Query (PLINQ)
   2. ASP.Net 3.5 Video Tutorials.
   3. 101 LINQ Samples.
   4. Xceed WPF Data Grid Component -Free full Version (1 Developer Licence ).
7. And finally The Official Visual studio 2008 training kit by Microsoft

Well These are the sites which I visit often to learn about these new technologies. I’m just sharing these with you to make it easy to find about these and learn them easily without spending much time to search for these.

I hope it helped you, Enjoy!!.

But we can write our own custom methods in your classes to Achieve this requirement, by looking at the SiteMapNode based on its title or URI. a sample is given below:

   1:  private string menuDescription=string.Empty;

   2:   

   3:  protected string GetDescriptionByTitle(string title)

   4:  {

   5:  /*this assumes that there is only one node with this title.

   6:  which is a standard in asp.net SiteMap Development*/

   7:   

   8:  SiteMapNode node = SiteMap.RootNode;

   9:  SearchForDesc(node, title);

  10:  return menuDescription;

  11:  }

  12:   

  13:  private void SearchForDesc(SiteMapNode node,string title)

  14:  {

  15:  if (node.Title == title)

  16:  {

  17:  menuDescription = node.Description;

  18:  return;

  19:  }

  20:  else

  21:  {

  22:  foreach (SiteMapNode childnode in node.ChildNodes)

  23:  {

  24:  //search within childnodes

  25:  SearchForDesc(childnode, title);

  26:  }

  27:  }

  28:  }

And we can use the StaticItemTemplate and the DynamicItemTemplate to Display this information and use the GetDescriptionByTitle() method inside the templates as given below:

<asp:Menu ID="Menu1" runat="server" Height="24px"
Width="109px" DataSourceID="SiteMapDS1" StaticDisplayLevels="2"
StaticSubMenuIndent="0px">
<StaticItemTemplate>    <%# Eval("Text") %> <br />
<small>
<%# GetDescriptionByTitle(((MenuItem)Container.DataItem).Text) %>
</small></StaticItemTemplate><DynamicItemTemplate>
<%# Eval("Text") %> <br />   <small>
<%# GetDescriptionByTitle(((MenuItem)Container.DataItem).Text) %>
</small></DynamicItemTemplate></asp:Menu>

And here is the output:

Hope it helps!.

And I was trying out visual studio 2008 and SQL server 2008 these days. And last night I found out that SQL server now support Tabled valued Parameters which allow us to send data tables as parameters to stored procedures. It still uses the same ADO.Net API.

Now I’m going to show how it works. For this I’m using the same scenario which I used in my previous post (reading contents of a folder and saving their information). here i have used sql server 2008 november ctp and visual c# 2008 express edition.

 First create the table given below:

CREATE TABLE FileDetails(
FileName varchar(50) PRIMARY KEY,
CreatedDate varchar(50) ,
Size decimal(18, 0) )

Then, we should declare a new Table User Defined Type in the database:

create type FileDetailsType as table
(
    FileName        varchar(50),
    CreatedDate        varchar(50),
    Size       decimal(18,0)
)

Then create a stored procedure that gets a parameter of the above type, and inserts many rows in a single command.

create procedure InsertFileDetails
(
    @FileDetails FileDetailsType readonly
)
as

    insert
    into   FileDetails (FileName, CreatedDate, Size)
    select FileName, CreatedDate, Size
    from   @FileDetails;

Then to execute this procedure, we can create a data table and add the rows in to it. And then pass this data table as parameter to the database.

private static void SaveFileDetail(List<FileInfo> info)

 {

  Console.WriteLine(“**********updating with tablevalued parameters****”);

  DataTable dt = preparedatatable();

  foreach (FileInfo file in info)

     {

       DataRow dr = dt.NewRow();

       dr[0] = file.Name;

       dr[1] = file.CreationTime.ToShortDateString();

       dr[2] = (decimal)file.Length;

       dt.Rows.Add(dr);

     }

 

           

 using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(“your connection string”))

    {

       SqlCommand cmd = conn.CreateCommand();

       cmd.CommandType = System.Data.CommandType.StoredProcedure;

       cmd.CommandText = “dbo.InsertFileDetails”;

       SqlParameter param = cmd.Parameters.AddWithValue(“@FileDetails”, dt);                              

       conn.Open();

       cmd.ExecuteNonQuery();

       Console.WriteLine(“Completed Updating the database”);

     }

Now that’s cool isn’t it????

Download the code 

And few more minutes of research I found out how to perform bulk operations against the databases using OPENXML and stored procedures.

What is OPENXML?

OPENXML is a function added to SQL Server 2000 that provides a row set view over an XML document. Since a row set is simply a set of rows that contain columns of data, OPENXML is the function that allows an XML document to be treated in the familiar relational database format. It allows for the passing of an XML document to a T-SQL stored procedure for updating the data.

OPENXML- Summery

• It extends the SQL Language
• It is used within T-SQL Stored Procedures
  • XML Document passed as parameter
• It uses row and column selectors utilizing XPath
• It supports the following:
  • Attribute and element-centric mappings.
  • Edge table row set.
  • XML annotation/overflow column.
  • Hierarchy support.

OPENXML and ADO.Net

This code block explains the usage of OPENXML to insert bulk data to database. It simulates the actual process I wanted ( processing .eml files) by reading files in a folder and saving their names, created date and size in bytes.

1. First create the table below:
   

   CREATE TABLE FileDetails(

   FileName varchar(50) PRIMARY KEY,

   CreatedDate varchar(50) ,

   Size decimal(18, 0) )

2. And then create the stored procedure below:
   

   CREATE PROC sp_bulkinsert @xmldata varchar(max)

   AS

   DECLARE @hDoc int

   exec sp_xml_preparedocument @hDoc OUTPUT,@xmldata

   –inserting data

   Insert Into FileDetails

   SELECT FileName, CreatedDate, Size

   FROM OPENXML (@hdoc, ‘/ds/fileDetails’,2)

   WITH (FileName varchar(50), CreatedDate Datetime, Size decimal) XMLFileDetails

   Where XMLFileDetails.FileName Not IN (Select FileName from FileDetails)

   EXEC sp_xml_removedocument @hDoc

   GO

3. The below sample code snippet shows how to call this stored procedure to insert bulk data to database at once.

We can retrieve the file details using FileInfo() objects and create a Dataset of the file details and then we can convert this Dataset to xml using WriteXml() Method of the Dataset.

private static string preparexml(DataSet ds)

{

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

StringWriter sw = new StringWriter(sb);

ds.WriteXml(sw, XmlWriteMode.WriteSchema);

return sb.ToString();

}

This xml representation of the data can be passed as the parameter to the stored procedure as given below :

private static void bulkInsert(string xml)

{

try{

SqlConnection con = creatCon();

con.Open();

SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(”sp_bulkinsert”, con);

cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;

cmd.Parameters.Add(new SqlParameter(”@xmldata”,SqlDbType.VarChar));

cmd.Parameters["@xmldata"].Value=xml;

cmd.ExecuteNonQuery();

Console.WriteLine(”Completed inserting file informations to database”);

con.Close();

}

catch(Exception ex)

{

Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);

}

}

That’s all simple isn’t it? You can see the performance of this method by writing another code to insert the same fields using the traditional 1 at a time way. Which surprisingly will show a huge difference in performance and time.

You can use the same way to update, delete records in bulk.

The complete code can be downloaded and tested in the below link :

Complete Source Code