Now we all know that Sharepoint is very XML Centric. I am in the midst of writing an interesting commandline utility that will make managing profiles darned easy. And as you know, once managing user profiles is easy, audience targeting becomes easy - huge benefit.

But that is not what this post is all about. See the issue is, frequently you will write a program that will expect some XML that must meet a certain standard. Usually that validation is done using an XSD Schema, so the Q is, how do you validate an XML file with a given XSD schema?

Here is a little function for your quiver -

public static bool IsXmlValid(string xmlFile, string xmlSchema)

{

    XmlSchemaSet schemaSet = new XmlSchemaSet() ;

    schemaSet.Add("", XmlReader.Create(xmlSchema));

    Stream docStream =

new FileStream(xmlFile, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read);

    XmlReaderSettings settings = new XmlReaderSettings() ;

    settings.Schemas.Add(schemaSet) ;

    settings.ValidationType = ValidationType.Schema;

    XmlReader xRead = XmlReader.Create(docStream, settings)  ;

    bool toReturn = false;

    try

    {

        while (xRead.Read())

        {

            // do nothing :-/

        }

        toReturn = true;

    }

    catch (XmlSchemaValidationException xExcp)

    {

        Console.WriteLine(

"Input document " + xmlFile + " does not match the schema", true);

        Console.WriteLine(xExcp.ToString(), true);

    }

    return toReturn;

}

Nice eh?

I'd also recommend reading a quick little modification to the above code, where you can embed the XSD's or other stuff as resources in your dll.