Fort Smith .NET User Group May Meeting - Dennis Palmer - XML is Everywhere!

XML, XHTML, XAML, app.config, web.config, Office Open XML, WiX, RSS, SOAP and sometimes REST. These days it's getting rare to find a software application that does not use some form of XML. It's everywhere! Remember ages ago (back in 2001) when you wrote your own xml parser? Hopefully you've been using XPath and the .NET classes inside System.Xml like XmlDocument and XmlNode for the last few years. But that's so 2003. With the 3.5 release of the .NET Framework and Visual Studio 2008, there is a whole new way of working with XML. Whether you're creating, editing or consuming XML, you need to know LINQ to XML and the XML Literals within Visual Basic. But don't take my word for it! Kathleen Dollard on Hanselminutes show #152 said, "If you code in any language and do not understand XML Literals in VB9, you're selling yourself short. Go learn about it... It's a really powerful mechanism." We'll cover LINQ to XML, how to enable XML Intellisense, and using VB XML Literals for dynamically generating XML.