.NET & XML

Chapter 4. Reading and Writing Non-XML Formats

While more and more information is stored in XML, there are still lots of systems out there that use other formats. Both legacy integration and new non-XML formats are constant challenges for XML developers. Now that you’ve seen how to use the implementations of XmlReader and XmlWriter provided in the .NET class libraries, you’re ready to learn how to implement your own custom types to handle some more complex scenarios. By combining XmlReader and XmlWriter, you can work with information stored in other formats as if it was XML, mixing and matching formats as you find appropriate for your projects.

For example, although the XmlReader class allows you to read standard XML syntax, there are alternative XML syntaxes that serve specialized purposes. There are XML syntaxes that do not use slashes and angle brackets, and some of these are considered to be more human-readable and less verbose than standard XML. Most of these alternative XML formats still retain all the functionality of standard XML. Other common non-XML formats contain structures you can treat as XML structures when convenient.