Sometimes technical, sometimes not, never a kitty

If you've ever listened to Hanselminutes, you've no doubt heard Scott mention "code smell" or "pretty code".  The new language features in VB9, including LINQ and XML being a native type, make XML generation not only easy, but beautiful.  Aside from the color scheme, look at how smooth this code snippet is.

Dim _order As New XElement(<Order>

    <ShipperRef><%= h.UniqueRef %></ShipperRef>

    <UniqueRef><%= IIf(h.CustomerPo <> "", h.CustomerPo, h.JdeNumber) %></UniqueRef>

    <Comments><%= _orderComments %></Comments>

    <OrderType><%= h.OrderType %></OrderType>

    <Workflow><%= h.Workflow %></Workflow>

    <RORRelationship><%= h.RORRelationship %></RORRelationship>

    <Supplier><%= h.SupplierNumber.ToString %></Supplier>

    <Customer><%= h.Customer.ToString %></Customer>

    <FreightBillableParty><%= h.FreightBillableParty %></FreightBillableParty>

    <MethodOfPayment>Prepay</MethodOfPayment>

    <HAZMAT><%= h.Hazmat %></HAZMAT>

    <GroupAssignment><%= SetGroupAssignment(h.GroupAssignment) %></GroupAssignment>

    <Weight><%= _orderWeight.ToString %></Weight>

    <Volume><%= _orderCube.ToString %></Volume>

    <OrderContact><%= h.PrimaryContactAssignment %></OrderContact>

    <ShipmentContact><%= h.PrimaryContactAssignment %></ShipmentContact>

    </Order>)

My VS 2008 theme is DesertNights, and the code was copied with CopySourceAsHtml.

Super simple and sweet:

So I was looking for a real quick way to publish an RSS feed from a Web application I created for a friend and found some great articles and components (RSS Toolkit for ASP.NET 2.0.)  However, I didn t find anything that used XML Serialization (specifically) to work with the RSS 2.0 Specification (maybe my Google skills are truly weak today.)  I use XmlSerializer religiously, and thought it would be quite trivial to build a set of classes to quickly create and publish an RSS feed.   Thus, as any geek would do, I did just that.

...

These classes are adorned with System.Xml.Serialization attributes, which comply with the RSS 2.0 Specification.   To create an RSS document, it s no more difficult than creating and populating a PONO (Plain Ole .NET Object.)

Full story at http://weblogs.asp.net/skillet/archive/2006/08/29/RSS-in-.NET-Made-Easy-with-XML-Serialization.aspx

Hat tip: Greg's Cool ...