Over the course of the book readers will develop a good appreciation of not only what XML is, and how to handle it in C#, but also how to use XML to build applications to run on a single desktop, single web server or distributed, multi-platform web services, in ways that have been extremely difficult to achieve with previous technologies.

To reinforce the core concepts, the book makes use of numerous individual examples along with two case studies. Firstly, there is an examination of how different XML based approaches can be used in the development of a contact application. The complexity of the project develops as the reader's knowledge increases through the book. Secondly, we dedicate a full chapter to describing the use of XML and a SQL Server database in the implementation of a web-based news portal.

Synopsis
Extensible Markup Language (XML) has been perhaps the biggest buzzword in application development for several years and now Microsoft has taken XML into the core of its .NET Framework. This book is aimed at teaching XML (and related technologies such as XPath, XSLT, and XML Schema) to beginning and intermediate C# developers who want to understand what all the fuss is about. Over the course of this book readers should develop an appreciation of not only what XML is, and how to handle it in C#, but also how to use XML to build applications to run on a single desktop, single web server or distributed, multi-platform web services, in ways that have been extremely difficult to achieve with previous technologies. To reinforce the core concepts, the book makes use of numerous individual examples along with two case studies. Firstly, there is an examination of how different XML based approaches can be used in the development of a contact application. The complexity of the project develops as the reader's knowledge increases through the book. Secondly, we dedicate a full chapter to describing the use of XML and a SQL Server database in the implementation of a web-based news portal.