Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Unleashed, Third Edition

Working with XML Directly Within Your Code (VB Only)

You can embed XML directly within your Visual Basic code. This can make creating XML messages and executing queries against XML a simple task in Visual Basic. To support this feature, Visual Basic enables you to write straight XML when using the data types called System.Xml.Linq.XElement and System.Xml.Linq.XDocument. The former enables you to create a variable and assign it an XML element. The latter, XDocument, is used to assign a variable to a full XML document.

Writing XML within your Visual Basic code is a structured process and not just simple strings assigned to a parsing engine. In fact, the compiler uses LINQ to XML behind the scenes to make all this work. Let’s look at a simple example. ...