How to remove empty elements from an XML document

Since this is kind of universally useful, I recently was able to perfect a little snippet of XSL to remove empty elements from an XML document. This only removes elements that have no inner content or attributes. (In case you're wondering, I did this to handle special legacy XML documents for serialization.)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="no" indent="no"/>
    <xsl:strip-space elements="*" />
    <xsl:template match="*[not(node()) and not(./@*)]"/>
    <xsl:template match="@* | node()">
        <xsl:copy>
            <xsl:apply-templates select="@* | node()"/>
        </xsl:copy>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

And in case you're not familiar with how to apply XSL in .NET:

C#:

XmlDocument xsl = new XmlDocument();
xsl.LoadXml(XSL_REMOVE_EMPTY_NODES); // constant contains the XSL above

StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
XslCompiledTransform transform = new XslCompiledTransform();
transform.Load(xsl);
transform.Transform(new XmlNodeReader(xml.doc), null, writer);
writer.Flush();

string transformedXml = writer.ToString();

VB.NET:

Dim xsl As XmlDocument = New XmlDocument()
xsl.LoadXml(XSL_REMOVE_EMPTY_NODES) ' constant contains the XSL above

Dim writer As StringWriter = New StringWriter()
Dim transform As XslCompiledTransform = New XslCompiledTransform()
transform.Load(xsl)
transform.Transform(New XmlNodeReader(xml.doc), Nothing, writer);
writer.Flush()

Dim transformedXml As String = writer.ToString()

You can also use a Stream or XmlWriter in place of a TextWriter like I have above. I just used a StringWriter since I needed a String for the final result.