This document presents my work as part of course COSC 4080 during fall 2002, under the supervision of Professor Jonathan Ostroff. The initial purpose of the project was to write a reusable component to store Eiffel objects in XML format, and also to investigate a new product from Eiffel Software, namely Eiffel Envision.

Eiffel Envision is a plug-in for Visual Studio.NET that facilitate the writing, debugging and testing of Eiffel code in Visual Studio.NET. Needless to say, the integration between Eiffel and the .NET Framework (hereinafter referred to as Eiffel.NET) is not just at the GUI level. Eiffel is now one of the few languages that are .NET compatible. This means that programmers can compile Eiffel code to run on the .NET Common Language Runtime (more on this issue in the next section).

This document is written in the form of a tutorial, and it reflects, in a way, the learning curve that I was facing when working on the project. Although the final code for the XML Serialization application is fairly short, I have revised it and restructured it dozens of time; at every step along the way I have learned something new, and realized that the code I have written was wrong, or perhaps it wasn’t efficient.

These are the topics that are covered in this document:
• Eiffel.NET and Envision – I present a tutorial about the integration between Eiffel and the .NET Framework, including step-by- step examples on how to use Envision, how to create Eiffel.NET applications, how to use C# classes in Eiffel code and how to use Eiffel classes in C# code (two-ways integration).
• Reflection – I introduce the concept of reflection and how it can be used in the .NET Framework. There are a few code samples that demonstrate the power of reflections – most of them are written in Eiffel.
• XML – As a part of this project, I learned how to process XML files using the .NET built-in classes. The .NET class library contains an XML API that makes life for the programmer fairly easy, and I use those classes in the XML Serialization application, which is all written in Eiffel.
• XML Serialization – The final deliverable of this project is the XML Serialization application. It is an application that can take any Eiffel object, and store it in an XML file. The application uses both the reflection API and the XML API of the .NET class library.

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