Question

This is probably a really simple thing, but I haven’t been able to find it, and I’m probably just searching for the wrong thing…

XmlTextReader –> Does it lock the file you’re reading? I’m using reader.Read() and that’s about it.

Answer 1

When you create a new XmlTextReader providing a string, it will lock the file with a write lock (but not a read lock); however, if you provide it a Stream, it would depend on the stream itself.

FileStream stream = new FileStream(@'myfile.xml', FileMode.Open,                             FileAccess.Read, FileShare.ReadWrite); XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(stream); 

You can now read without having a lock.