Ponies!

I just finished reading the new whitepaper on XLinq, and although in my opinion it is a two trick pony for dealing with XML in a procedural programming model, the tricks that it has are stunning*. As in the pony does a back flip then juggles apples stunning. So, being the grammar maven that I am, the two things that I liked best are the functional construction of elements and the simplified API for processing and transversing elements. I love the current version of System.XML in the .Net framework because of the raw power it offers, but to be honest it is a pain in the ass to use. The API is so close the XML document object model that the resulting code is voluminous and hard to read because of all of the intermediary steps required to do anything. These new libraries simplify a lot of the work from a syntax point of view; so much so that dealing with XElements using XLinq should be very similar to the way that I would deal with DOM nodes in JavaScript. The only hesitation I have about all this newfangledness is that by taking full advantage of these libraries, programmers will face entire redesigns of systems if they ever decide to port anything over to other platforms, but that would probably happen anyway since porting is never quite as easy as you think it is.

Told you I was a dork… this is what happens when English majors become software engineers.

*I am not going to count the language-integrated query aspect of XLinq as one of the tricks since that’s a higher-level abstraction that deserves its own discussion. Yes, I know that is one of the most important parts. Yes, I am ashamed of myself.