Chapter 14. XML

Ever since XML (Extensible Markup Language) first arrived on the scene in the late 1990s, it has been the focus of intense activity and overenthusiastic speculation. Based on nothing but ordinary text, XML offers a means of sharing data between just about any two applications, whether they're new or old, written in different languages, built by distinct companies, or even hosted on different operating systems. Now that XML has come of age, it's being steadily integrated into different applications, problem domains, and industries.

The .NET Framework provides a range of options for using XML. But although XML is conceptually simple, processing XML is often tedious (with reams of repetitive code to write) or tricky (with the potential ...

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