In today's business, it's very common to exchange data with business partners.  Most of the information needing to be exchanged resides in a database of some sort.  Because of its flexibility and increasing ease of handling, XML has been utilized more and more as the method of information exchange.

In this article, we'll pretend we are AdventureWorks Cycles, a manufacturer and retailer of bicycles.  To assist the stores which carry our products, we provide them with an updated product catalog on a quarterly basis.  They import this catalog into their databases so their product information is up to date.  Our task in this article is to create an XML file from the AdventureWorks database so it can be securely transferred via FTP to our logistics provider.

We'll use Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition for this example, and we'll create a simple console application which can be run as a scheduled task. Remember this is just example coding, not production level coding, so be sure to implement best practices before implementing anything you see here.