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Just a quick plug – tomorrow evening I’m doing a session on ADO.NET Data Services (“Astoria”) at the SQL Server User’s Group at Microsoft, Reading. See here for details; http://sqlserverfaq.com/events/167/Sessions-on-Understanding-ADONET-Data-Services-Windows-7-features-indepth-and-the-usual-SQL-Nuggets-and-Networking.aspx it’d be great to see you there.

I did a talk yesterday down at the UK Launch of Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 about Language Integrated Query as it stands in VS 2008 and .NET Framework V3.5. Firstly, thanks to everyone who came along to the talk - much appreciated. Also a massive thanks to the guys who helped us out with the track at the launch namely; Guy , Andy and Amanda who did a stunning job. An equally massive thanks to the guys who helped us out in the community area, the ATE and the labs who were all doing a great job - I won't list names here but you know who you are and what a big difference you made to the event :-) If you want to catch up on the launch after the event then you can check out the new ( Silverlight based ) Virtual Launch Experience which is up here; Virtual Launch Experience Now...the content isn't 100% the same as what we did in Birmingham so I thought I'd share my session with you here in written form in case you wanted some snippet from it. Firstly, here's the slides in PPTX , PPT and...

Someone mailed me the other day with a query as to how they can use LINQ to XML in order to change this XML file; <? xml version ="1.0" encoding ="utf-8" ? > < root > < x > < a /> < b /> </ x > < c /> < d /> </ root > into this XML file; <? xml version ="1.0" encoding ="utf-8" ? > < root > < a /> < b /> < c /> < d /> </ root > that is - find the node called "x" and remove it whilst reparenting its child nodes to the parent of the node "x". I ended up with something like; XElement doc = XElement.Load( "data.xml" ); XElement xEl = doc.Element( "x" ); doc.AddFirst(xEl.Descendants()); xEl.Remove(); which is fine (enough) but there's a part of me that would have liked to be able to collapse this down into less code. I managed to get it down to; XElement doc = XElement.Load( "data.xml" ); XElement xEl = doc.Element( "x" ); xEl.ReplaceWith(xEl.Descendants()); which felt a bit better and I can't really think of a way to cut...

LINQ to XML and the XML API that underpins it contained in the System.Xml.Linq namespace is essentially a DOM-like API. This means that documents are loaded into memory to form a "tree" representation and that act of loading into memory means that the bigger the document you have, the more memory you're going to need. That's not always practical and the existing XML classes in the .NET Framework V2.0 have dealt with this by providing DOM-like functionality (i.e. XmlDocument, XPathDocument and so on) and streaming functionality via XmlReader and XmlWriter. The essential idea of an XmlReader is that it provides forward only, read-only cursor over an XML document. LINQ to XML does not have a general purpose way of working with large documents (read the discussion here and here ) but it does propose a pattern for doing it based on using an XmlReader. I created a relatively large XML file from selecting data from Northwind using a FOR XML query and then I used a quick PowerShell loop to concat the file onto itself...