Archives for January 11, 2008

.NET 3.5, LINQ, XML, VB 9

Posted on 1/11/2008 to Developer Stuff

One of the reasons I moved to a new host is because they were already offering ASP.NET 3.5 on their servers (and the price was right). The next logical step, after moving this site to the new host, seemed to be moving this site to ASP.NET 3.5. In order to try some new things out with LINQ to XML, and VB 9, that has now happened.

The first order of business was to try using LINQ to XML to pull in an RSS or Atom feed of my bookmarks at ma.gnolia, and utilize that data in the Links section of this site. It was ridiculously easy. A couple of lines of code to get a list of all the distinct tags, and a few more lines to grab the title and URL of each bookmark, based on the tag selected. Right now, I am just displaying both in simple lists (using the new ListView control, also very nice), but I will be spiffing it up and adding some additional functionality soon.

Now, since my day job involves working with XML most all of the time, I am very tempted to bring some of my existing code into the world of LINQ to XML.

For more information on LINQ, check out Scott Guthrie's LINQ related posts.

Additional LINQ Links: