Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Refactoring Support for XML Literals
There's been some interest recently in the new XML literal feature coming to Visual Basic 9. If you're not familiar with this feature, the idea is that you can embed XML directly into VB code like this:
Sub Main()
  Dim publicationdate = Date.Today
  Dim isbn = 42
  Dim price = 0.99D
  Dim firstName = "Dustin"
  Dim lastName = "Campbell"

  Dim book = <book publicationdate=<%= publicationdate %> ISBN=<%= isbn %>>
               <title>F#: For The Excessively Nerdy</title>
               <price><%= price %></price>
               <author>
                 <first-name><%= firstName %></first-name>
                 <last-name><%= lastName %></last-name>
               </author>
             </book>
End Sub

That compiles to something similar to this:

Public Sub Main()
  Dim publicationdate As Date = Date.Today
  Dim isbn As Integer = 42
  Dim price As Decimal = 0.99
  Dim firstName As String = "Dustin"
  Dim lastName As String = "Campbell"
 
  Dim book = New XElement("book", _
                          New XAttribute("publicationdate", publicationdate), _
                          New XAttribute("ISBN", isbn), _
                          New XElement("title", "F#: For The Excessively Nerdy"), _
                          New XElement("price", price), _
                          New XElement("author", _
                                       New XElement("first-name", firstName), _
                                       New XElement("last-name", lastName)))
End Sub

To me, this is a great example of what syntactic sugar should be all about: making tasks easier for developers. The VB team has gone to great pains to expose the new APIs in System.Xml.Linq in the most intuitive way possible. As a C# guy, I'm shamefully filled with deep feelings of VB envy.

Since I spend most of my time working on a wholly remarkable refactoring tool, you might be wondering what sort of refactoring support we have in store for these snazzy new XML literals. How about Extract Method?

Here's the preview hint that is displayed for Extract Method when the XML literal is selected:

Extract Method on XML Literal

And here's the successfully refactored code after applying Extract Method:

Private Function GetBook(ByVal publicationdate As Date, ByVal isbn As Integer, _
                         ByVal price As Decimal, ByVal firstName As String, _
                         ByVal lastName As String) As XElement
 
  Return <book publicationdate=<%= publicationdate %> ISBN=<%= isbn %>>
           <title>F#: For The Excessively Nerdy</title>
           <price><%= price %></price>
           <author>
             <first-name><%= firstName %></first-name>
             <last-name><%= lastName %></last-name>
           </author>
         </book>
End Function
 
Sub Main()
  Dim publicationdate = Date.Today
  Dim isbn = 42
  Dim price = 0.99D
  Dim firstName = "Dustin"
  Dim lastName = "Campbell"
 
  Dim book = GetBook(publicationdate, isbn, price, firstName, lastName)
End Sub

Notice the pieces that Refactor! must have to be in place to get this right:

  • The refactoring must be smart enough to understand how the XML literal is transformed into XElements, XAttributes and XNames under the hood.
  • The refactoring must identify any dependant variables that are referenced within the embedded expressions of the XML literal.
  • The refactoring must infer the types of the dependant variables in order to declare the parameters of the new method.

We still have some work to do before Visual Studio 2008 reaches the RTM stage, but it looks like things are shaping up nicely.

Quality Code | Refactor! | The Bleeding Edge | Visual Basic
posted on Wednesday, September 19, 2007 6:21:21 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)  #    Comments [0]

kick it on DotNetKicks.com
Related posts:
Empty Nothings
Random Crash
Naming Anonymous Types with Generate from Usage
Lesser-Known VB: Customizing the Completion List
Modifying VB XML Literals at Debug-Time
YAPES: Problem Seven, Part 2
Comments are closed.

Page rendered at Thursday, March 11, 2010 10:06:31 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)

msn cams