Chapter 16: .NET Development

Chapter 16

By now you should have little doubt that XML truly forms a core technology substrate in Microsoft's .NET Framework. Everywhere in Windows .NET, from metadata to ASP.NET to XML Web services, XML is used as the native data representation format. This chapter starts by exploring the other major use of XML in .NET, data access, to show you how Microsoft has effectively merged the relational and hierarchical DOM access models under a single, unified, architecture.

Next we dig deeper into the XML object model of the .NET Framework to look at reading and writing XML documents. Finally we allow ourselves to stray slightly off course from the main focus of this book to take a look at some of the popular programming languages that can be used to build .NET applications.