Although XML is in widespread use throughout the world now, there are still many "legacy" systems that do not know a thing about XML or how to use it. Many of these systems work with different types of flat-files that delimit data using commas, tabs, or have fixed-length fields. The keyword here is of course "delimit". Aside from a potential header row, flat-files do not describe data in any great detail. They simply delimit it in some type of manner.

This sample application demonstrates how to use the XmlTextWriter class in conjunction with an XML mapping file to convert flat-file data (delimited and fixed-length) to XML.