3.1. Introduction

Language Integrated Query lets you focus on what you have to do and not on how to do it. With this in mind, XML becomes just another data source for LINQ.

From a developer perspective, XML is not an easy thing to manage because the World Wide Web Consortium's document object model (DOM) is not a simple library to use. The DOM framework often requires you to write a lot of code to produce even a little XML output. Moreover, if you need to search for a particular item within an XML document you have to use DOM features, such as XPath, based on query syntax that is not intuitive. XPath uses a searching model that is not similar to other query languages, such as SQL, and you have to spend time to learn it.

Eliminating such complexity is the main motive behind LINQ to XML. .NET offers its own library to manage XML, but LINQ to XML goes a big step further; it integrates the LINQ standard query operators with XML documents. In addition, LINQ to XML offers classes for easily creating XML.