J.D. Meier, Srinath Vasireddy, Ashish Babbar, and Alex Mackman
Microsoft Corporation

May 2004

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patterns & practices Library

How to Use This Checklist

This checklist is a companion to Chapter 9, "Improving XML Performance"

Design Considerations

Check	Description
	Choose the appropriate XML class for the job.
	Consider validating large documents.
	Process large documents in chunks, if possible.
	Use streaming interfaces.
	Consider hard-coded transformations.
	Consider element and attribute name lengths.
	Consider sharing the XmlNameTable.

Parsing XML

Check	Description
	Use XmlTextReader to parse large XML documents.
	Use XmlValidatingReader for validation.
	Consider combining XmlReader and XmlDocument.
	On the XmlReader, use the MoveToContent and Skip methods to skip unwanted items.

Validating XML

Check	Description
	Use XmlValidatingReader.
	Do not validate the same document more than once.
	Consider caching the schema.

Writing XML

Check	Description
	Use XmlTextWriter.

XPath Queries

Check	Description
	Use XPathDocument to process XPath statements.
	Avoid the // operator by reducing the search scope.
	Compile both dynamic and static XPath expressions.

XSLT Processing

Check	Description
	Use XPathDocument for faster XSLT transformations.
	Consider caching compiled style sheets.
	Consider splitting complex transformations into several stages.
	Minimize the size of the output document.
	Write efficient XSLT.