One of the most highly anticipated features of Visual Studio 2008 is XML Literals.  It doesn't sound like much until you start thinking about some of the ways that you can leverage this capability.  One creative way is to replace code, Beth Massi of the VB Team recently made a post highlighting a little of the power that you can have with XML Literals in Visual Basic 2008.

http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi/archive/2007/10/23/avoid-underscores-in-your-multiline-strings.aspx

What's interesting is her post leverages another new feature call type inference which allows her to create the new object with specifically needing to specify details of the type.  She continues the example but just the first section allowing you to format strings without any special characters is pretty awesome.  Of course the syntax <%= %> might give me nightmares of ASP but overall the capability is very cool, and combined with some of the power of XLINQ that VB provides (see Scott Hanselman's post: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/XLINQToXMLSupportInVB9.aspx) VB is definitely looking to simplify working with XML... you know that data structure which is at the core of things like XAML and Silverlight.

Update:
Beth's keeping the XML literal ideas going with her latest post: http://blogs.msdn.com/bethmassi/archive/2007/10/26/xml-literals-tips-tricks.aspx