Barton Learns Visual Basic!

I recently convinced a friend of mine, Barton Friedland (founder of Bay.NET and rock star), to take a look at the next version of Visual Basic -- 9.0 and specifically it's implementation of LINQ to XML and XML literals. Barton is a curious as a cat when it comes to languages and I thought I could easily coax him into taking a look. Phrases like "XSLT and XQuery killer" and "most productive tool" were thrown about during the conversation and that got him hook, line and sinker.

Barton and his superhero/coworker side-kick Amy at Luminous Group in SF both started spending time learning Visual Basic 9 in the evenings. When I checked up with them last month Barton told me he was ready to start posting. Well he finally did and he's written this post and this one both on XML literals, a new unique feature of VB 9.

I'm really enjoying seeing the typical C-style programmers like Barton take a very serious look at VB.

Enjoy!