VB 9.0 (Orcas) - XML Literals

As many of you have probably heard by now, at PDC2005 Microsoft previewed some of the technologies that have been grouped under the code-name "Orcas".

For a Visual Basic developer, it was sometimes a bit depressing that all the examples that were used to demonstrate new technologies were in C#.

However, the VB 9.0 team have introduced a concept into VB that is not present in C# 3.0 (at least not yet) - the concept of XML Literals.

What is an XML Literal - simply put you can place any valid XML directly in line wth your VB code.

For instance, if you want to define an XElement (new object introduced as part of XLinq - effectively a lightweight version of XmlElement), you can use the code:

Dim countries As XElement = _
   
      
      
   

Here I have used the continuation character _ to keep things clear.

Withe the new querying capabilities introduced in XLINQ (the Xml part of the LINQ project) you could generate some pretty fancy Xml querying, but more on XLINQ, LINQ and DLINQ in a future Blog.