Programming Microsoft® ADO.NET 2.0 Applications: Advanced Topics

Chapter 15. Working with XML Data

Companies began trying to communicate in an automated fashion some time ago, but they always encountered issues related to the type of data being exchanged. There are many variations of structured file formats for exchanging data, including fixed-width files and delimited files. Fixed-width files and delimited files cannot easily reflect a relational or hierarchical structure, however, and the alternative of structured data files typically resulted in monolithic implementations that were not reusable. It became obvious that a structured file format was needed for communicating data—a format that everyone could use, that would support relational and other types of structured data, and that would include features ...