Classes in the .NET Framework class library’s System.Xml namespace and its children vastly simplify the reading, writing, and manipulating of XML documents. Key members of those namespaces include XmlDocument, which provides a DOM interface to XML documents; XmlTextReader and XmlValidatingReader, which combine SAX’s efficiency with an easy-to-use pull model for reading XML and optionally validating it too; XmlTextWriter, which writes XML documents; XPathDocument, XPathNavigator, and XPathNodeIterator, which enable you to perform XPath queries on XML documents and iterate over the results; and XslTransform, which performs XSL transformations on XML data. Working with XML is an inescapable fact of life in software development today. The FCL’s XML classes make life with XML a great deal easier.