Steve Eichert presents in recent blog posts some of the advantages that the next version of VB.NET is going to have for working with XML.
The first feature is named
XML Literals. It allows writing templated XML fragments right in your VB code. This makes XML an integral part of the VB.NET language!
The example provided by Steve:
Public Class PurchaseOrder
Public PODate As Date
Public Number As String
Public Function AsXml() As XElement
Return <purchaseOrder><poNumber date=<%= Me.PODate.ToString() %>><%= Me.Number %></poNumber></purchaseOrder>
End Function
End Class
Congratulations for the VB code, Steve ;)
The second feature:
XML Axis Properties.
This one allows you to use a direct syntax for performing XPath-like queries against XML. For example:
Return rss...<item>(3).@SomeAttribute
These things were in
COmega if I remember well, but did not make it to C# :'(