XML and ADO.NET

Learn to leverage the XML features built into SQL Server and examine the new XML data type in SQL Server 2005. Excerpt: It wouldn’t be a stretch of imagination to say that if English is the lingua franca of the world, XML is probably the lingua franca of the computer world. XML by the very nature of it allows you to create a structured and hierarchical representation of your data. Because it is text based, it can flow freely from one platform to another; and because parsers and standard schema exist on most platforms for its validation, it is the almost de facto choice for transferring data between different applications on different platforms. Since ADO.NET is a data access architecture, and XML is a popular method to hold and move data, it is quite reasonable to expect that ADO.NET has significant interoperability with XML built in it. As a matter of fact, in the .NET Framework itself, there is the System.XML namespace that is entirely devoted to working with data in XML form.