XSLT 2.0

XSLT / XPath 2.0 offer nice improvements over 1.0 in several ways, including an ability to leverage schema-defined datatypes, support for regular expressions, support for user-defined functions, and especially a much easier way to aggregate results into groups.   Neither are yet implemented over standalone documents in our libraries, mainly because we have a policy of not implementing W3C specifications in the core System.Xml and MSXML libraries until they are official Recommendations.

Our users have made it very clear that they want an XSLT 2.0 implementation once the Recommendation is complete.   A team of XSLT experts is now in place to do this, the same people who have been working on  the XSLT enhancements that will be shipped in the forthcoming "Orcas" release of Visual Studio / .NET 3.5.  Orcas development work is winding down in advance of Beta releases over the next several months, so there is no possibility of shipping  XSLT 2.0 in Orcas.   The XSLT team will, however, be putting out Community Technology Previews (CTP) with the XSLT 2 functionality and appropriate tooling as the implementation matures.  The eventual release date and ship vehicles (e.g. a future version of .NET or a standalone release over the Web) have not been determined, and depend on technical progress, customer demand, and other currently unknowable factors. 

We very much wish to hear from our user community about their requirements that could be met with XSLT 2.0.  We can discuss how to address those requirements in this interim period with existing technologies and those that will be released in "Orcas".  Those who urgently need an implementation of that runs in the .NET environment may wish to check out the Saxon open source project  or the schema-aware commercial version produced by Saxonica . 

Please don't hesitate to follow up via our XML team contact page if you have comments or questions.