In the first part of this series, Choosing an XML API, I covered the numerous XML-related classes in .NET for reading and writing XML documents and discussed the characteristics of each. In the second part of this series, Reading XML Documents, I walked you through several practical examples of reading XML documents to help you better understand the tradeoffs. Although for reading XML there is a clear trade-off between performance/efficiency and productivity, the tradeoff isn't as significant for writing XML documents because all of the options are quite easy to use and there aren't nearly as many options to consider.