Today, during a Live session @ Microsoft,  I talked about how you can use VB.NET 9.0 XML Literals to parse, create XML documents.
As promised, I’ve uploaded the demo’s and the slides to my skydrive, which you can find here. Note that the session was in dutch, but the demos were in english

In my mail merge demo, I used the Open XML Format SDK which you can download from here and the Xml to Schema tool that can be downloaded from here