Because the XML Schema language is expressed as an XML vocabulary, it can be dealt with just as any other XML document. XmlReader, XmlWriter, XmlDocument, XPathNavigator, XsltTransform, and the rest of .NET’s types can be used to read, write, manipulate, navigate, and transform an XSD document.

In addition to the standard ways of dealing with XML documents, however, the System.Xml.XmlSchema assembly includes a host of types that can be used to deal with schema documents in a very XSD-centric way.