he .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference, Volume 2: Networking Library, Reflection Library, and XML Library, completes the definitive reference to the .NET Framework base class library. This book-and-CD set offers programmers unparalleled insight into the ECMA and ISO specifications for the classes and members, while also explaining why they were designed as they were and demonstrating how to use them. This volume covers the Networking, Reflection, and XML libraries, complementing the coverage of the Base Class and Extended Numerics libraries found in Volume 1.

The printed book contains high-level descriptions of each namespace, plus detailed descriptions and samples of each type, including annotations, inheritance diagrams, and a listing of members; while the accompanying CD contains a vastly expanded version of the book’s text that includes detailed descriptions of each member and samples for most members?almost two thousand searchable pages of immediately useful reference material, plus a full source-code archive.

With the ECMA and ISO standards as its core, the combined book and CD include:

• A clear and complete overview of each namespace, describing its purpose and functionality and the inheritance hierarchy of types it defines.
• Type descriptions. Each type is covered in its own chapter, with a quick reference to the C# declaration syntax for all members defined in the type, and a detailed description of how the type is used.
• Annotations from key insiders: members of the Microsoft design team and the ECMA Standards Committee. These comments cover everything from design rationale and history to common problems and shortcomings, with exceptional clarity and candor.
• Reference tabs and an exhaustive index, which allow readers to quickly and easily navigate the text.
• Code samples. Types are illustrated by working code samples, with output included.
• Reusable source code for the more than one thousand samples is supplied as an archive on the CD. All code has been tested with versions 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0 of the .NET Framework and, where appropriate, with the .NET Compact Framework.

This sample chapter explains the System.Xml.XmlReader class, which represents a reader that provides non-cached, forward-only access to XML data. The class enforces the rules of well-formed XML but does not perform data validation. It conforms to the W3C Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 and the XML recommendations for namespaces. The class models a given set of XML data as a tree of node types specified in the XmlNodeType enumeration. To read a document, you advance the reader from node to node using the Read method. The current node refers to the node on which the reader is positioned.

Download this sample chapter in PDF form (313 KB).

Reproduced from the .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference, Volume 2: Networking Library, Reflection Library, and XML Library by permission of Addison Wesley. ISBN 0321194454, copyright 2005. All rights reserved.