An Extensive Examination of LINQ: Introducing LINQ to XML
XML is an increasingly popular way to encode documents, data, and electronic messages. There are a number of ways to programmatically create, modify, and search XML files. Since its inception, the .NET Framework’s System.Xml namespace has included classes for programmatically working with XML documents. For instance, the XmlReader and XmlWriter classes offer developers a means to read from or write to XML files in a fast, forward-only manner, while the XmlDocument class allows developers to work with an XML document as an in-memory tree representation. LINQ to XML is a new set of XML-related classes in the .NET Framework (found in the System.Xml.Linq namespace ), which enable developers to work with XML documents using LINQ’s features, syntax, and semantics. Compared to .NET’s existing XML APIs, LINQ to XML is a simpler, easier to use API. For a given task, LINQ to XML code is typically shorter and more readable than code that uses the XmlDocument or XmlReader / XmlWriter classes.
