Summary
Classes in the .NET Framework class library s System.Xml namespace and its children vastly simplify the reading, writing, and manipulating of XML documents. Key members of those namespaces include XmlDocument, which provides a DOM interface to XML documents; XmlTextReader and XmlValidatingReader, which combine SAX s efficiency with an easy-to-use pull model for reading XML and optionally validating it too; XmlTextWriter, which writes XML documents; XPathDocument, XPathNavigator, and XPathNodeIterator, which enable you to perform XPath queries on XML documents and iterate over the results; and XslTransform, which performs XSL transformations on XML data. Working with XML is an inescapable fact of life in software development today. The FCL s XML classes make life with XML a great deal easier.