NEWBIE question

[jojo11]

I signed up for eBay's developer program and they give the option of using their SDK where you could use VB or write an ASP.NET program using API calls to retrieve XML pages. I want to do the second since it will be a good primer to get up to speed with web apps and .net.
Unfortunatley I can't even get to first base trying to call a simple XML. Does anyone know of a good beginning web site tutorial on both creating and calling an xml doc? I need to know about the http headers as well.
Please refrain from Microsoft Tutorials.

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[lonetron]

Here is a tutorial for accessing P2B (Person 2 Bot) public API calls. Perhaps you should leverage this tutorial to learn the basics of client coding with VB.NET and VB for calling generic XML servers over HTTP. This particular example uses MSXML to communicate with a xml-producing server over the web. BTW if you want to use ASP or ASP.NET you will have to use ServerXMLHTTP40. Anyhow code is well documented and will give you all the information you need. The URL to the open source P2B sample client is

http://www.p2bconsortium.com/p2bsamplebot.zip

Also here are some technologies for accessing XML servers and their strengths and weaknesses (they are listed from high level to low level):

*(.NET Web References, MSSOAP, etc.) – Very high level APIs specific to SOAP XML over HTTP. These technologies pull the interface definition information for the server and allow the developer to communicate with the SOAP by calling late-bound methods. In the case of .NET Web References the interface definition is loaded into the IDE at development time allowing tooltips for webmethods exposed by SOAP servers.

*HTTP Specific APIs (MSXML.ServerXMLHTTP, MSXML.XMLHTTP, etc.) – Good all around generic XML over HTTP. Allows users to do low level HTTP Posts and HTTP Gets without having to queue up packets or parse/strip HTTP delimiters from the data sent/received.
Here is an example from

http://www.p2bconsortium.com/p2bsamplebot.zip

open source:

'Step 2: notify P2B consortium that bot is leaving the chat room
Dim oHttp As New MSXML2.XMLHTTP
oHttp.open "POST", "

http://p2b.vathix.com:81/P2bConsortium/consortium.aspx",

False
oHttp.send (strLeaveRoomRequest)

*Sockets (winsock, java sockets, etc.) – can access any kind of XML over the internet and not limited to the HTTP application layer protocol. For XML web servers wrapping their data in HTTP you will have to parse out the XML from the HTTP delimiters with string functions and wrap XML in HTTP delimiters before sending it to the web server. You will also have to manually queue up packets. If the XML server you are accessing uses HTTP there are simpler technologies then this to use.

 

[dwarfthrower]

http://www.w3schools.com/xml/default.asp

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