Caffeinated Wisdom

Thanks to the Windows Live Spaces Photo Album plugin project at CodePlex, I was able to abstract the code to get Album and Pictures information from a Live Spaces account. This class serves as a helper when generating javascript code for slideshows containing photos stored at Live Spaces. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Xml; using HtmlAgilityPack; using System.Web; namespace LivePhotoDataProvider { public class AlbumInfo { public string URL { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } } public class PhotoInfo { public string FullSizeURL { get; set; } } public class LivePhotoData { public List<AlbumInfo> GetAlbums(string live_spaces_link) { List<AlbumInfo> albums = new List<AlbumInfo>(); XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument(); try { doc.Load(live_spaces_link);

When you need load POCO objects from a SQL Server database in a faster way than LinqToSQL, you may consider using  SQL Server’s XML features.  The FOR XML PATH command can be a really powerful tool to convert your relational data into XML that C# can de-serialize into C# plain objects. The key is to find how C# serializes objects to XML. In order to do that, I did a small test: public class Store { public string Name { get; set; } public int Sales { get; set; } public List<StoreContact> StoreContact { get; set; } } public class StoreContact { public int ContactId { get; set; } public int ContactTypeID { get; set; } } public static void TestSaveToXML(string path) { XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(List<Store>)); TextWriter writer = new StreamWriter(path); List<Store> stores = new List<Store&g