This is super simple but amazingly few developers know CDATA exists. About a year
ago I asked Burr Sutter what was all this CDATA
garbage in messages we were receiving from an (IBM) MQ feed. He told me and I
was stunned I had never heard of it before, I soon said “wow that’ll make my
XML driven interface so much easier in terms of having readable XML”. The XML in question
was full of &lt; for < and &gt; for > – in some cases I was storing
XML inside XML and that can get messy! Take a look at the little example below.. pretty
sweet eh?

<PaulsCDataExample>
  <HardToEncodeString>Paul
Lockwood” &lt;paul@d0tnetworkaholic.com&gt;</HardToEncodeString>
  <EasyToEncodeString><![CDATA["Paul
Lockwood" <paul@d0tnetworkaholic.com>]]></EasyToEncodeString>
</PaulsCDataExample>

This is why contracting rules - there are always fresh faces to learn from. Last
night it dawned on me that casting a working ArrayList to an array [via ToArray(typeof)] 
after parsing an input message/ config file is better than my
usual ‘smart’ approach of creating a strongly typed collection (assuming you are only
reading the data). A Thoughtmill guy educated me there – a few months back the use
of Factories really clicked thanks to an Innovative Architects employee. Now should
I feel stupid or educated?