Microsoft® Visual C#® .NET 2003 Unleashed

XML Schema Definition

Before looking at the code involved in working with XSD, you need to spend some time learning about XSD itself. This section of the chapter will show you the basics of XSD, and the basic syntax for defining the elements, attributes, and data types that exist within structured XML documents.

Introduction to XSD

As mentioned earlier, XSD itself is written in XML. You can think of it as a standardized XML format for describing other XML documents. When defining an XML schema, you always start with the <schema> element. Before getting into the details of the syntax and structure of an XSD document, look at a few samples of XSD documents to get a frame of reference for the rest of this section. Listing 29.1 shows a sample XSD ...