Employing XML in the .NET Framework

The XML classes in the .NET Framework provide a comprehensive and integrated set of classes, allowing you to work with XML documents and data. XML classes in the .NET Framework can be broken into several groups: parsing and writing XML with the XmlReader and XmlWriter, validating XML with the XmlValidatingReader, and editing an XML document using XmlDocument. The XslTransform, XmlSchema, and XPathNavigator classes, support performing XSL Transformations (XSLT), editing XML Schema definition language (XSD) schema, and applying XPath queries.

In This Section

• Architectural Overview of XML in the .NET Framework
  Provides an overview of the XML architectural in the .NET Framework.
• Overview of Security Enhancements for System.XML
  Provides an overview of the security enhancements for System.XML in the .NET Framework version 1.1, and outlines what classes are affected by the changes, and provides links to the topics that contain detailed information.
• XML Document Object Model (DOM)
  Describes how the XmlDocument class and its associated classes conform to the W3C Document Object Model (Core) Level 1 and Level 2 namespace support specifications.
• Reading XML with the XmlReader
  Describes how the XmlReader class provides a non-cached, forward only, read-only access to XML data over an XML stream.
• Writing XML with the XmlWriter
  Describes how the XmlWriter class provides a non-cached, forward only, way of generating XML streams and helps the user build XML documents.
• XSLT Transformations with the XslTransform Class
  Describes how the XslTransform class implements the XSLT 1.0 recommendation to transform one XML document into another document, and supports compiled scripting with Visual Basic, C#, and JavaScript.
• XPathNavigator in the .NET Framework
  The XPath functionality is the ability to query a data store for some node or set of nodes. The XPathNavigator is the class that provides the methods required to implement XPath queries over any data store, and is based upon the Data Model described in the XML Path Language (XPath) 1.0 Recommendation (www.w3.org/TR/xpath.html).
• XML Schema Object Model (SOM)
  Describes the classes used for building and manipulating XML Schemas (XSD) by providing an XmlSchema class to load and edit a schema.
• Validation of XML with Schemas
  Describes the document type definition (DTD), XML-Data Reduced (XDR) schema and XML Schema (XSD) validation available in the .NET Framework.
• XML Integration with Relational Data and ADO.NET
  Describes how the .NET Framework enables real-time, synchronous access to both the relational and hierarchical representations of data through the DataSet object and the XmlDataDocument object.
• Resolve External XML Resources Named by a URI
  The XmlResolver is an abstract class that resolves external XML resources that have been named by a URI.
• Character Encoding of XML Names and Conversion of Data Types
  Describes how the XmlConvert class encodes and decodes names in XML data.
• Conversion of XML Data Types
  Describes how the XmlConvert class performs strongly typed conversion of XML data.
• Namespaces in an XML Document
  Describes how the XmlNamespaceManager class is created and used whenever namespaces are needed, while holding the prefix and the namespace it represents.