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Other Types of XML Data

As I mentioned earlier, this chapter only scratches the surface of XML data files. There are other kinds of XML data files.

If you think about it, these last two examples used XML as a minidatabase. If you have worked with ADO, you know that ADO can save data to an XML file as a database. Some programs do this. In .NET you can save a data set to an XML file.

Another common use of XML files is object persistence. When an object in .NET is saved to disk, it can be saved as an XML file. This is serialization. Though coverage of serialization is beyond the scope of this book, this technique has quite a few uses. It also has some drawbacks, such as not saving private fields and type information. I suggest you view the copious online help entries for more information on this subject.


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