XML Literals Tips/Tricks
A couple quick tips here when using XML literals in your Visual Basic programs.
#1: I've started using XML literals everywhere I had been using multiline strings and text merging (as I explained in this post). For instance, I started using them in my ToString methods of my classes:
Public Overrides Function ToString() As String
Return <string>
ID : <%= Me.ID %>
Name : <%= Me.LastName %>, <%= Me.FirstName %>
Address : <%= Me.Address %>
: <%= Me.City %>, <%= Me.State %> - <%= Me.Zip %>
</string>.Value
End Function
#2: It's also sometimes handy to pass an XElement as a parameter if you need dynamic parameters, or were using your own custom parameter objects previously:
Dim id = 1
Dim name = "Beth"
DoIt(<param>
<customer>
<id><%= id %></id>
<name><%= name %></name>
</customer>
</param>)
Private Sub DoIt(ByVal param As XElement)
Dim customers = From customer In param...<customer> _
Select New Customer With _
{.ID = customer.<id>.Value, _
.FirstName = customer.<name>.Value}
For Each c In customers
Console.WriteLine(c.ToString())
Next
End Sub
Enjoy,
-B
Beth is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio Community Team at Microsoft and is responsible for producing and managing content for business application developers, driving community features and team participation onto MSDN Developer Centers (http://msdn.com), and helping make Visual Studio one of the best developer tools in the world. She also produces regular content on her blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi), Channel 9, and a variety of other developer sites and magazines. As a community champion and a long-time member of the Microsoft developer community she also helps with the San Francisco East Bay .NET user group and is a frequent speaker at various software development events. Before Microsoft, she was a Senior Architect at a health care software product company and a Microsoft Solutions Architect MVP. Over the last decade she has worked on distributed applications and frameworks, web and Windows-based applications using Microsoft development tools in a variety of businesses. She loves teaching, hiking, mountain biking, and driving really fast.
