The Microsoft .NET platform supports the significant W3C standards in use today such as XML1.0, XPath 1.0, XSLT and XML Schema.

This submission covers the System.Xml namespace in the Microsoft .NET platform detailing the suite of classes that provide XML processing support, the innovations in their API design and their practical usage when building XML aware applications. System.Xml introduced the concept of pull model XML parsers, a cursor style API based upon the XPath data model and streaming output on XSLT processors. With the growing usage of XML capable of marking up the information content of data sources including structured and semi-structured documents, relational databases, and object repositories this submission then covers the future direction of XML development on the .NET platform including XQuery support, XML storage in Microsoft's SQL Server relational database and the ability to define XML views over relational tables from the middle-tier.