The XPathNavigator class (located in the System.Xml.XPath namespace) provides a random, cursor-style API that allows XML documents to be parsed. The ASP.NET pages available in the sample download demonstrate different ways that the XPathNavigator class can be used to parse and extract data from XML documents.

Version 1.1 of the .NET framework supports today’s mainstream XML technologies including DTDs, XML Schema, XSLT, XPath, SOAP 1.1, DOM Level 2, and XML namespaces. While version 2 of the framework continues to support these technologies (and newer versions where appropriate), it also contains integrated support for SQLXML functionality, simplifies mapping relational data to XML, and provides an execution and compilation environment for a new type of query language called XQuery.

This example demonstrates the basics of loading XML into a DataSet. DataSet methods such as ReadXml(), GetXml() and GetXmlSchema() are called and the output of the methods is written to an ASP.NET page. The DataSet is then bound to a DataGrid.