Question

This might be a bit of a code smell, but I have seen it is some production code, namely the use of StringBuilder as opposed to XmlDocument when creating XML documents. In some cases these are write once operations (e.g. create the document and save it to disk) where as others are passing the built string to an XmlDocument to preform an XslTransform to a document that is returned to the client.

So obvious question: is there merit to doing things this way, is it something that should be done on a case-by-case basis, or is this the wrong way of doing things?

Answer 1

I’d recommend using XMLTextWriter to build up XML documents which (quote from MSDN):

Represents a writer that provides a fast, non-cached, forward-only way
of generating streams or files
containing XML data that conforms to
the W3C Extensible Markup Language
(XML) 1.0 and the Namespaces in XML
recommendations.

I’ve used it numerous times – more performant than using XMLDocument, with the XML-safety you don’t get with StringBuilder.