XML parsing APIs in .NET

The .NET API has quite a few classes to help us manipulate XML data.
We have the 'XMLReader' class and its subclasses like 'XMLTextReader', 'XMLValidatingReader' ect that provide a forward-only, non-cached, read-only cursor to XML data. An interesting point is that XMLReader uses a 'pull model' unlike SAX push event model.

Then we have XPathDocument that provides a fast, read-only cache for XML document processing using XSLT. Quite good if U need to use XPath to query the XML data.

We have a special class for loading a DataSet directly into a XML form for manipultion. This class is the XMLDataDocument class that can load either relational data or XML data and manipulate that data using the W3C Document Object Model (DOM).