.NET Developer Tip
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The System.XML Assembly
Peter G. Aitken
The .NET Framework is the foundation of Microsoft's next generation of development tools. Given the increasing importance of XML in all areas of programming and data processing, the inclusion of powerful, integrated XML support in .NET is not surprising. The book chapter from which this tip comes, excerpted from InformIT, provides a brief overview of .NET and then details the XML tools that are provided by the Framework and the Visual Studio .NET development environment.
XML support in .NET is provided by the classes in the System.XML namespace, or assembly. An assembly is a collection of related classes. In the case of System.XML, the classes are related by having to do with XML processing. The primary classes are as follows:
- XmlTextReader: Provides forward-only, fast, noncached access to XML data
- XmlValidatingReader: Used in conjunction with the XmlTextReader class to provide the capability for DTD, XDR, and XSD schema validation
- XmlDocument: Implements both level 1 and level 2 of the W3C Document Object Model specification
- XmlTextWriter: Permits generation of XML documents that conform to the W3C XML 1.0 specification
- XmlNavigator: Supports evaluation of XPath expressions
Note that the Simple API for XML (SAX) is not supported in .NET. Similar functionality is provided by the XmlTextReader class, although there are significant differences, which are detailed later in the chapter.
To read the entire article from which this tip is excerpted, click over to InformIT. You have to register there, but the registration is free.
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