As web developers we have, at some point in our careers generated html on the server. It always gets messy especially when your are generating a table from data. Its always done with messy strings! What about setting attributes... string row = "<td class=\"name\">" + value + "</td>" .. what a pain.
Xlinq is new in .NET 3.5 (The X stands for XML), you can read more about it here. I found(i think) a much better way to generate html on the server using asp.net. I needed to make an ajax call to the server that returned a filtered and paged table based on the parameters I passed.
Here is a screen shot of what the code looked like:
And generating the rows of the table:
The helper methods, Html.AsLink creates html markup("<a href...") as an XElement otherwise the special characters are escaped.
Pretty neat huh?
