Chapter 6. XML

XML is the lingua franca of application development—a common syntax that underlies Web services, Microsoft ADO.NET, and a slew of cross-platform programming initiatives. At times, the sheer number of XML extensions and grammars can be overwhelming. Common XML tasks don’t just include parsing an XML file, but also validating it against a schema, applying an XSL transform to create a new document or HTML page, and searching intelligently with XPath. All of these topics are covered in this chapter.

The Microsoft .NET Framework includes a rich complement of classes for manipulating XML documents in the System.Xml group of namespaces. These namespaces, outlined in the following list, contain the classes we concentrate on in this chapter.