Scott Hanselman does North Dallas .NET User Group

Just had a great time at Scott Hanselman's talk on Advanced System.Xml at the North Dallas .NET User Group. It was a fantastic tour through the features available, especially spending time on XmlReader.

In particular I loved how his conversation started with "What makes Xml special?" Responses from the crowd were great (obviously there was a point here which I'll get to in a moment)

"It's Well-Formed...."

To which Scott suggested that the following was also well-formed:

FIRST,LASTTim,Rayburn

And that hence this was not:

FIRST,LASTTim,Ray,burn

"It's a standard..."

To which Scott suggested that he start a company espousing CSV as a standard which could be accepted.

There were many more things which were thrown out, but the point was to drive home that Xml is about the Infoset or PSVI (Post Schema Validated Infoset). In other words it is not about the angle brackets but rather about a described structure which can be validated. And that if you're writing code which requires you to know that angle brackets exist, then you're writing code wrong.

In all, great talk. It was a personal thrill to meet Scott, I've read him for several years on his blog and I've got no doubt I make more money now because I've read his blog.