Viral Coding Examples in Presentations

Joe Fawcett (fellow XML MVP) came across a great example (from the Microsoft.Public.Xml newsgroup) of one of my biggest pet peeves, “We (the community) are doing a very poor job teaching the average developer how to use XML properly in .Net”. 

I want to draw your attention to a line from the original post:

“So, is it possible to directly modify the xml file instead of using the dataset.”

And the first response was:

“you can do it using Data Island”

Why does thing question bug me so much?  Because we (the community) have done a very bad job using XML correctly in our articles and presentations.  The reason why Joe pinged me with this example is because I went on a rant earlier this year (in a private conversation) how disappointed I was in one of the DevDays presentations.  In the presentation, they were trying to show some cool Whidbey WinForm stuff, and the example went something like this: “We have this XML file and we want to display the info it in a WinForm, so let’s use a DataSet to open the XML file and then bind it to the controls on the form”.   NOOOOO my mind went.  This is not the way to introduce developers to XML.  Yes, can you open an XML with a dataset, and yes it is quick and easy to do, but it is enforcing very bad development practices, which lead to questions like Joe found.  People learn new technologies from these examples, and we really have to be careful when writing them.