C# doesn't plan to implement XML literals, though we might think about this more based on customer feedback on VB's early work in this area. Our main purpose in talking about LINQ so early is to get this kind of feedback early enough that we can respond to it.

There is an interesting "who's on top" issue at play here. We've done a lot of work with ASP.NET to have C# and VB code and tools work well in the middle of markup (code within markup). Having XML literals in the language (markup within code) inverts this.

The larger the template XML is, the more it seems like the "code within markup" model makes sense. The smaller the XML pieces are, the more the "markup within code" model makes sense. Supporting both is potentially interesting, but in the big gray area in the middle, there would be two ways to do the same thing, and this would be unfortunate from a complexity standpoint.

Anders made a comment about this in his C# 3.0 talk yesterday. His comment was basically that languages are more stable than most platform technologies, and therefore language designers must be careful to avoid tight coupling between the language and individual technologies. Before doing XML literal support, we would think hard about finding ways to have this dependency be loose. We would want to understand how the language support would evolve in a compatible way even if there were significant changes in XML or the XML support in the .NET Framework.

--Scott