title: Fast way to get number of elements in a xml document
body: <p>is there a best practice to get the number of elements from an XML document for progress reporting purposes? 
  I have an 2 GB XML file containing flights which I need to process and my idea is to first get the number of all  elements in the file and then use a counter to show x of x flights are imported to our database.</p>
  
  <p>For the file processing we are using the XmlTextReader in .NET (C#) to get the data without reading the whole document into memory (similiar to sax parsing).</p>
  
  <p>So the question is, how can I get the number of those elements very quick... is there a best practice or should I go through the whole document first and doe something like i++; ?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>