XLinq Presentation at the XML 2005 Conference

Erik Meijer will present "XLinq: XML Programming Refactored (The Return of the Monoids)" at Atlanta's XML 2005 Conference on Wednesday, November 16, 2005. Note that the conference program lists the presentation title as "XMP [sic] Programming Refactored (The Return of the Monoids)" because the XLinq name was under NDA until PDC 2005; "XMP" is an obvious typo. The paper, by Erik and Brian Beckman*, provides a concise description of the objectives and implementation of the XLinq API for LINQ. XLinq replaces the document-oriented XML DOM with an element-oriented API that enabled constructing elements and attributes independently of a containing document. The paper is unique because all but one of its examples use VB 9.0 rather than C# 3.0. VB 9.0 is required to implement XML literals and axis members. XML literals enable definining elements and attribute with VB 9.0 code similar to the following:

Dim BillTo =
<billTo country="US" >
  <name>Robert Smith</name>
  <street>8 Oak Avenue</street>
  <city>Old Town</city>
  <state>PA</state>
  <zip>95819</zip>
</billTo>

Notice the lack of VB's line-continuation characters, which aren't required or permitted in XML-literal statements. Whitespace formatting is preserved and XLinq overloads the ToString method to simplify display of formatted documents. (Oleg Tkachenko has some reservations about functional construction of XML trees and VB literal XML.) Axis members substitute dot syntax for XPath axis specifiers. For example, BillTo.street returns all street child elements from the BillTo XElement object. Read Erik's paper to learn more about VB 9.0's XLinq implementation. --rj Technorati: LINQ XLinq * Brian Beckman was one of the original developers of Microsoft's XLANG—a notation for the specification of message exchange behavior among participating web services—and is the author of the "Physics of Racing" series.