Xml literals escaping

I am somewhat bias towards C#, but one can admire the xml literals in vb.net.

This is a language feature where you can just add xml to

Dim someXml As XElement = <foo>bla<bar active=”false”/></foo>

But how do you add characters that have some a meaning in xml, like “&” or “<“. Turns out you have two options:

Look up how you should escape it (& => &amp; ) but the editor (vs2013) will show wavy underlines underneath the literal. It will compile do and work as expected.

Embed a literal string

Dim someXml As XElement = <foo>Ampersand <%= “&” %><bar active=”false”/></foo>

this uses a method to embed expressions in xml literals.

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