Preface

XML offers a flexible and standardized way to share data between programs running on disparate platforms. The .NET Framework is an exciting new platform for developing software that natively shares its data and processing across networks. It seems natural enough that XML and .NET fit together; indeed, Microsoft has provided a full suite of XML tools in the .NET Framework, and .NET relies heavily on XML for its vaunted remoting and web services capabilities.

This book is about .NET and XML. Now, there are plenty of books out there about .NET, and certainly there are quite a number about XML. However, as I set out to learn about using XML in .NET, I discovered a dearth of books about .NET and XML, especially ones that go into detail about the things that Visual Studio .NET can do behind the wizards.

This is a serious gap. The .NET framework provides deep support for the XML family of standards; not only does it use XML internally, but it also maks its XML tools available to you as a developer. There is a strong need for developers to know how .NET uses XML and to learn how they can use .NET to write their own XML-based applications.

In this book I hope to bridge this gap by providing details about how you can use .NET to write applications that use XML and by explaining some ways in which .NET uses XML to provide its advanced networked application features.