There are times when your software will need to talk to another program or hardware device over a network or serial. When deciding on how to format your messages, there are some things you need to think about. While serial has some specific requirements in order to know where your messages start and stop, it may be advantageous to use this regardless of whether you send your messages via serial, IP, or any other networking protocol.

I've been doing a lot with XML in storing information for a while. Usually this is to store settings or to log data for debugging purposes. Only just recently did I try to create an XML viewer within a .NET application usually opting for just viewing it in Explorer. It wasn't until a client wanted to be able to easily access the data within the XML logs did I research into the best way to display XML data from within an application.

The easy way would be to use an explorer component and just let IE display it. This was more raw than I wanted it to be. I first looked at the datagridviewer which replaces the datagrid control. I figured it would display the information much like Excel does where it just creates a column for each tag. With embedded tags, this isn't ideal, but at least all the information would be out there and it'd be a good starting place. I was frustrated to realize that the datagridview wouldn't display any embedded tags at all. If a tag had embedded tags, it wouldn't display the tag at all.

As I thought about it, I determined that the best way to display XML data would be in a tree view. I set out to create a tree view that would take an XMLDocument and display the results automatically.