Hello.

I'm exploring the concept of generics in C# 3.0, particularly how they might relate to XML types. I'm having trouble grasping the connection described in MattWar's blog, which suggests generics and XML are fundamentally linked. While I understand how generics allow parameterized specialization of classes (like a list of ints, longs, or custom objects), the example of XML generics like "Foo<int x="...">" confuses me. Is it parameterization, an attribute, element constraint, or class conversion? I don't see the advantage over generating classes from XSDs. I'm curious about how XML generics might be tied to schemas for constraining parameter values and eager to learn more about this potentially paradigm-shifting concept.

I've been exploring Amazon's SOAP API and Yahoo's REST API and I'm quite impressed with both. I'm thinking about ways to make these two APIs interact and will share my ideas in a future post. I've also been working on using REST in .Net 1.1, which is a little tricky but possible, thanks to Martin G. Brown's work. The process involves using an XSD of the response, running it through XSD.exe to generate a Dataset object, and then processing the results. It's a similar concept to WSDL, but without the automatic stub generation. I'll post some Yahoo API code examples soon. I plan to look into Google's API as well, even though it's in beta with usage restrictions.