Mike Champion has a great post that offers up some theories for why LINQ to XML has been getting positive user reviews.  In short, he thinks it could be because Anders is "the man", and can read every developers mind.  He also has a magical crystal ball that he can look into to figure out what to include and more importantly what to exclude from the LINQ to XML API.  I might not be getting all the details of Mike's post right, so you *may* want to read what he said yourself rather than taking my word for it.

I've been working with LINQ to XML as part of my work on our LINQ book, and I must say it's a seriously kick ass XML API.  I've done a lot of XML work in the past and I've never had as much fun working with XML as I do when using LINQ to XML.  The key highlights for me are:

• Functional Construction: Have you ever created XML using existing .NET XML API's?  Enough said, functional construction beats the pants out of anything else out there for creating XML.
• Powerful Transformation capabilities: By combining the powerful querying capabilities of LINQ with the functional construction pattern for XML creation LINQ to XML provides a lot of really nice transformation capabilities.  In addition to supporting superb XML to XML transformations, we also get killer support for transforming our XML into object structures, LINQ to SQL objects, and whatever else you can think up.
• LINQ: What else needs to be said, sprinkling LINQ query support on top of an XML API makes for a kick ass query experience.  We get the best of XPath and XQuery but in a much nicer, cleaner, and straightforward API.

Now that I'm back on the "blogging wagon" I'll be looking to start the LINQ to XML for president campaign that I promised way back when.