Beth Massi shows off how you can use XML literals in VB.NET to do some very, very powerful stuff in a very, very straightforward way. http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showNum=138 Enjoy!

Following up from my last post , danieldsmith asked about a couple of additional details. I think I responded in the comments, but because (a) it's generally useful, and (b) I had some problems with my network connection (because I monkeying around with...

When loading an XML document through XmlDocument.Load or XDocument.Load , the default behavior when finding a DTD reference is to go resolve the URL, which typically means one or more web requests. Often, however, the DTD is there more as a marker of...

As a short follow-up to my last post on reasoning about code , I wanted to touch upon abstraction in general - meaning "information hiding" in the general sense, and not necessarily a particular programming mechanism such as polymorphism or some such...

When we have conversation about API design, or more generally about fragments of code that we write or we think customers will write, we often talk about reasoning about code . We typically mean that someone reading the code will be able to understand...

To wrap up a bit on the partial class support for generated code scenario , let's look at a case we missed. Although our workflow is great for "structural" code (fields and simple properties and such), what about methods? For example, let's say that we...

C# allows you to create nested classes - that is, classes that exist "within" a different class. Depending on what visibility you give these classes, they can be just as public as anything else (the Environment.SpecialFolder enumeration is such an example...

Frequently you'll write classes that represent a concept that is also described elsewhere. For example, you'll have a class that represent a row in a table, a service the web or the graphical design of a form. These external concepts have descriptions...

I know, I know - two announcements in a row? What's happening to this blog? This is big enough to warrant it though - SP1 is now available , and if you're using SQL 2008, you definitely want to look into this. No fancy new features, you'll get "it...

Find all the goodness at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/cc655792.aspx , including cache notifications and (of course!) even more performance improvements. For more details, check out what's new in Velocity CTP 3 . Enjoy!