Day 12. Accessing XML in .NET

For the last two days, you've learned about data access in .NET. The theme throughout has been how extensible markup language (XML) is everywhere in .NET, but you can write great applications without knowing too much about it. That all changes today. There are times when you need to deal with XML files, and you need to know what to do when that happens. The .NET Framework has broad support for all XML data access scenarios, so if you need to access and manipulate XML, the tools are there to do so. Today you get a crash course on

• What XML is and how it fits into .NET

• Using the Schema Designer in Visual Studio .NET to create XML schemas

• Using the XML Editor in .NET to edit XML files

• Binding schemas to XML files using XML Editor in Visual Studio .NET

• Validating XML data against an XML schema

• Using the DataSet to read and write element-based XML data from SQL Server

• Using the DataReader and the FOR XML AUTO clause in SQL Server to create attribute-based XML files

• How to read and manipulate XML files using XmlReaders

• How to read and manipulate XML files using the XML document object model (DOM) classes in .NET

• Using XPath queries to query nodes in XML files