XML Literals

I love XML Literals in VB.NET. They're a great way of generating valid XML instead of dealing with giant concatenated strings.

After discussing testing an XML Processing type class with a colleague this morning I thought I'd show him how this could be achieved quite nicely using XML literals. In his case; the code base is C# but that's not a problem for us.

	Imports System.Text
	Imports Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting
	<TestClass()>
	Public Class GivenAValidXmlPerson
	Private _person As XDocument
	Dim _id As Integer
	Dim _firstName As String
	Dim _lastName As String
	Dim _dob As Date
	Dim _results As MuonLab.Validation.ValidationReport
	<TestInitialize()>
	Public Sub Setup()
	Me._id = 1
	Me._firstName = "Dom"
	Me._lastName = "Finn"
	Me._dob = New DateTime(2000, 1, 1)
	Me._person =
	<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
	<people>
	<person>
	<id><%= _id %></id>
	<firstname><%= _firstName %></firstname>
	<lastname><%= _lastName %></lastname>
	<dob><%= _dob %></dob>
	</person>
	</people>
	Dim validator = New XmlPersonValidator()
	Me._results = validator.Validate(Me._person)
	End Sub
	<TestMethod()>
	Public Sub TheValidatorShouldBeValid()
	Assert.IsTrue(Me._results.IsValid)
	End Sub
	End Class

view raw GivenAValidXmlPerson.vb hosted with ❤ by GitHub

We are able to create an XML document directly in the code instead of concatenating a string and parsing that into an XDocument. You get really nice intellisense whilst creating the document and you can also loop over a collection for example to generate the XML.

The whole project can be found on my Github here: https://github.com/DominicFinn/XmlLiteralsForTesting 

Let me know if you like it! For me, it's all part of the "write language for the job" ethos.

Beth Massi is a good source of VB.NET tips in general, this are some nice tricks that you can use XML Literals for: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bethmassi/archive/2007/10/26/xml-literals-tips-tricks.aspx

She also did a DotNetRocks TV episode on XML Literals that you can find here: http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showNum=119

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Dom Finn

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