All posts by : XmlTeams WebLog

1 of 116 | Hotfix for Visual Studio hang when opening Web project from a remote site - Under certain conditions opening Web projects from remote sites may become very slow. We've seen quite a few 'hang' reports submitted via 'Send Information to Microsoft' feedback (aka Dr. Watson). The reason is that sometimes XML editor (which is used when you edit web.config) may begin walking remote Web site file structure looking for XML schema files. Over a slower link this process may take minutes and IDE will appear unresponsive.   A hotfix is available at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB958094   Irinel Crivat Program Manager | Data Programability ...

2 of 116 | MSXML4 SP3 Is Available Now! - Today, we officially released MSXML4.0 Service Pack 3 (SP3) on the Microsoft Download Center as a stand-alone installer in multiple languages. MSXML4.0 SP3 is a complete replacement of MSXML4.0, MSXML4.0 SP1 and MSXML4.0 SP2 and contains a number of bug fixes to enhance security and reliability. Approximately nine years ago, MSXML4.0 was released to the web. MSXML4.0 was superseded by MSXML6.0 six+ years ago and is only intended to support legacy applications.  After MSXML4.0 SP3, there are no future service packs planned.  Also, please note that SP2 support will end in November 2009.  MSXML4.0 customers are recommended to upgrade to MSXML6.  MSXML6 has new functiona......

3 of 116 | Equality Semantics of LINQ to XML Trees - In certain scenarios, it is important to be able to compare two XML trees for equivalence.  For example, if you are writing a web service that serves results of queries, and you want to cache query results so that duplicate queries use previously cached results instead of always accessing the underlying database.  However, the senders of those queries may potentially be using a variety of tools to generate the queries, and these tools may introduce trivial differences into the XML.  The intent of the queries may be identical, but XNode.DeepEquals returns false if you compare the XML that contains semantically equivalent, but trivially different queries. This post describes a......

4 of 116 | XML Schema Designer - Content Model View - The new XML Schema Designer (see this previous blog post for a d/l location to the CTP) offers four views over XML Schema Sets: XML Schema Explorer, Graph View, Content Model View, and Start View.  This entry will focus on the Content Model View.  The Content Model View provides a detailed view of individual nodes in a schema set. Basics of the view: Q: What’s the purpose of the Content Model View? A: The Content Model View (CMV) allows you to understand the specifics of a schema set. It lets you drill down into the content model of schema nodes, and will facilitate a deeper understanding of the schema set and the XML instance document the schema describes. Q: How do you get t......

5 of 116 | XML Schema Designer in the PDC VPC - In the Orcas SP1 release we released our XML Schema Explorer.  In the Visual tudio 10 PDC VPC we shipped our first rev of the next set of planned features for our XML Schema Designer.  Check out the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP VPC here.  Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting in more detail about the features in the CTP. - Tim Laverty PM, Data Programmability XML Tools...

6 of 116 | XML Schema Explorer Channel 9 Session - Beth Massi and Yang Xiao did a great Channel 9 session that centered on XML Literals and the XML Schema Explorer. Check the session out here. One thing that doesn’t come across in the video is that the Explorer can be used with any XSD set, not just with XSDs associated w/ your VB project. See our previous blog posts here and here on the Schema Explorer for more detail. …and thanks to Beth & Yang for doing the video! Tim Laverty PM, Data Programmability XML Tools...

7 of 116 | XML Tools and Technology Survey - The Data Programmability XML Tools team is conducting a survey focused on XML technology and tools usage over the coming weeks.  The survey takes about 15 minutes to complete and we’d appreciate it if you would take the time to respond to it.  We plan to use the survey results to help drive prioritization of features over the coming releases of Visual Studio and SQL Server. The survey can be found here:  https://mscuillume.smdisp.net/Collector/Survey.ashx?Name=XMLTools Thanks, Tim Laverty PM, XML Tools...

8 of 116 | New XSD Functionality in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta 1 - We’re thrilled to announce that today the new XML Schema Explorer is included in the Orcas SP1 Beta release for Visual Studio 2008. We previously released a CTP showcasing a subset of the XML Schema Explorer functionality last August. Many of the people who downloaded and tried our August preview requested that we ship the functionality in Visual Studio 2008 and so we are. You can download the beta here. The XML Schema Explorer illustrates our initial thinking about the future of XSD tools from Microsoft. Instead of working with strictly one XSD file in a text editor, the XML Schema Explorer allows you to view and work with an XML Schema Set, showing all XSDs imported and included in......

9 of 116 | SQLXML 4.0 Not Installed in SQL Server 2008 - Prior to SQL Server 2008, SQLXML 4.0 was released with SQL Server and was installed by all SQL Server editions, except in SQL Server Express. Beginning Starting with SQL Server 2008, the latest version of SQLXML is no longer included in SQL Server.   When SQL Server 2008 is generally available, the latest version of SQLXML will be SQLXML 4.0 SP1.  The URL for the site where you can install SQLXML 4.0 SP1 will be added to this blog entry, and to the SQL Server 2008 Books Online, when SQLXML 4.0 SP1 is available.   If an application that requires SQLXML 4.0 will run on a computer where SQLXML 4.0 is not installed, you will need to download and install SQLXML 4.0 SP1. &n......

10 of 116 | XML Tools in Visual Studio 2008 - CoDe Magazine published an article on XML Tools.  It covers a wide range of topics: Editing XML files, Schema cache and catalogs, Performance and working with large files, XSLT debugging, and Extending XML Tools Enjoy!...

11 of 116 | XML Tools for Visual Studio in print - Scott Hanselman talks about XML Tools in his new book "Professional ASP.NET 3.5: in C# and VB".  He mentions XML Editor, which is available in Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, as well as XML Schema Explorer, which we plan to ship in the next service pack....

12 of 116 | LINQ to XSD Alpha 0.2 - I’m happy to announce that today we are re-releasing the LINQ to XSD Preview Alpha 0.2 for Visual Studio 2008. The previous preview release of LINQ to XSD targeted Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2008 but did not work on later builds. Many of the people who originally downloaded and tried the LINQ to XSD Preview Alpha requested an update for the final release of Visual Studio 2008 – this release is it. You can download it from here.   The LINQ to XSD preview illustrates our initial thinking on a strongly-typed programming experience over LINQ to XML. Instead of working with untyped XML trees, LINQ to XSD allows you to program in terms of strongly-typed classes, generated based on an XSD sche......

13 of 116 | Announcing the XSLT Profiler Addin for VS 2008 - XML Tools team has released the XSLT Profiler Addin for VS 2008 - a quick and reliable performance analysis profiler tool that assists in the development and debugging of XSLT documents. The XSLT Profiler Addin for VS 2008 allows developers to measure, evaluate, and target performance-related problems in XSLT code by creating detailed XSLT performance reports. The XSLT Profiler includes a wealth of useful hints for XSL and XSLT style sheet optimizations, which are essential for XSLT-based applications that demand maximum performance.   If you need to develop reliable and robust software, the XSLT Profiler is capable of detecting the performance errors and defects in coding so that t......

14 of 116 | MSDN Webcast: XML Tools in Visual Studio 2008 plus XSLT Profiler and XML Schema Designer - On Tuesday we did a live MSDN Webcast to demo XML tools in Orcas as well as a few addons we are planning to release shortly after Orcas RTM.  The webcast is now available online (http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032355975&Culture=en-US). If you have any feedback about our tools or features, we'd like to hear it! Below is a list of topics covered in the webcast and time markers for easier access. XML Editor overview: 2:15    Color-coding, formating, brace-matching, basic editing support: 2:15    Error-checking/validation: 5:35    New Schema Dialog: 8:05    Snippets: 11:00&nbs......

15 of 116 | LINQ to XSD Preview Alpha 0.2 to go with Orcas Beta 1 - Around Memorial Day we released a new preview release for LINQ to XSD. The download has been picked up meanwhile by blogs and search engines. I am planning to blog about X/O mapping (“Typed XML programming”) and the project somewhat more in depth shortly, but I wanted to quickly complement the download with this info: ·         Here is the download. ·         Requires Orcas Beta 1. ·         Functionality-wise identical with Alpha 0.1. ·         Some new samples related to “Data Contract” and the papers at XML 2006. You should a......

16 of 116 | XML Tools Screencasts - These videos provide some great information and a preview of the new XML Editor, XSLT Debugger, and EDM Wizard coming in Orcas, as well as a sneak preview of a new XSD Designer and EDM Designer that we can expect to see released after the upcoming Orcas release. ...

17 of 116 | XML Schema Facets - I have received a number of requests over a period of time asking how to get all the facets defined on simple types or complex types with simple content in an XML Schema. I recently wrote a code sample for the same and I thought i will post it for wider consumption. The code sample will handle restrictions on lists, unions as well as facets defined on base types.  public static void GetSchemaTypeFacets(XmlSchemaType schemaType) {   if (schemaType == null || schemaType.Datatype == null) { //Complex type with complex content   return;  }   XmlSchemaSimpleType st = schemaType as XmlSchemaSimpleType;  if (st != n......

18 of 116 | Erik Meijer on LINQ, XML, and the future at XTech 2007 - Erik Meijer gave a talk at the XTech 2007 conference on LINQ, XML, and his vision for "LINQ 2.0". The presentation covers the formal underpinnings of LINQ to XML, the additional XML features in VB9, and some thoughts about the next steps. To summarize, LINQ 1.0 provided the necessary (but not sufficient) technology for radically simplifying distributed data-intensive applications. With LINQ 2.0 we use will take things to the next level by stretching the standard .NET programming model to cover the Cloud. Jeni Tennison has an interested-but-skeptical review.  She definitely understands the most fundamental point of LINQ: "A big distinction between previous attempts to work acro......

19 of 116 | Live from MIX07: Silverlight and XML! - Greetings from MIX07 everyone!That's right, Scott Guthrie announced this morning, to a sold out crowd at MIX07, the details around Silverlight, Microsoft's cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and Rich Interactive Applications (RIAs) for the Web.XML and SilverlightFirst, let me say how excited I am to begin discussions about Silverlight and XML. Even though all you clever XMLers may have forecasted it, for the past several months, the involvement of the .NET Framework within Silverlight has been under wraps. Thus, it is great to be able to take a step back to dig into what we have created thus far as well as chat about the ......

20 of 116 | The BIG LINQ to XML change in Beta1... - [updated to point to the online version]  ... is the documentation written by Eric White.    The online version is at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb387098(VS.90).aspx  If you install the "MSDN Library for Visual Studio Codename Orcas", you can navigate as follows: + Development Tools and Languages   + Visual Studio     + .NET framework Programming in Visual Studio       + Language-Integrated Query (LINQ)         + LINQ to XML There is literally enough content here to fill a decent-sized book, with lots of examples and sample data. There is a "Getti......

21 of 116 | LINQ to XML Changes in Orcas Beta1 -   [updated with the public download location and resolution of the "XNamespace.Blank" issue] As S. Somasegar announced, Orcas Beta 1 is ready to ship and is available for download.  There are some new (and renewed) features in LINQ to XML that you can check out in this release, and some minor changes introduced in response to reviews and comments: The "renewed" feature is XStreamingElement.  As we noted previously, it was removed after the May 2006 CTP to keep the slate clean for possibly incompatible changes to support streaming.  At the end of the discussion we concluded that XStreamingElement is necessary and that the original design made sense. We added LoadOptio......

22 of 116 | XML Notepad Source Code on CodePlex - XML Notepad 2007 source code is now available on http://www.codeplex.com/xmlnotepad. Enjoy!...

23 of 116 | To Trust, or Not to Trust? - Validation of an XML document against an Xml Schema guarantees that the structure and content of the xml conforms to the types defined in the schema. Does this mean that we automatically elevate the trust level of a document that has passed schema validation? Can we use schema validation as a security layer to our application?   The general recommendation is that validation of an xml document should not preclude the need for secure coding practices in the application that consumes the validated data.  That being the case, we know of applications where length facets are used to ensure that a input parameter is not longer than the specified length, pattern facets are used to verif......

24 of 116 | Streaming with LINQ to XML - Part 2 - In the first post in this series we gave some background to a problem the LINQ to XML design team has been working on for some time: how to easily yet efficiently work with very large XML documents.  In today's world, developers have a somewhat unpleasant choice between doing this efficiently with fairly difficult APIs such as the XmlReader/XmlWriter or SAX, and doing this easily with DOM or XSLT and accepting a fairly steep performance penalty as documents get very large. Let's consider a real world example - Wikipedia abstract files.  Wikipedia offers free copies of all content to interested users, on an immense number of topics and in several human languages.  Needl......

25 of 116 | XML Notepad 2007 version 2.3 is now available - New features include support for XInclude, Goto Definition, XSD annotations in tooltips, a new navigation combo box for opening XML directly off HTTP, new menus for changing node types, better handling of XML documents containing illegal characters plus a lot of bug fixes.  See Updates.xml for full list of changes and link to download.  PS: the new download size is 1.81mb, if you do not see this hold down the control key when you click the download button to update your IE cache....

26 of 116 | MSXML4 is going to be kill bit-ed - Hi,   As a part of our MSXML4 End of Life plan , we are going to kill bit MSXML4 in the October – December timeframe of this year. Kill Bit applies to Internet Explorer only. After the kill bit , applications will not be able to create MSXML4 objects in the browser.(Add link for killbit) Applications outside IE like C++ apps will continue to work with MSXML4.   We are announcing this in advance so that our customers get sufficient time to try their applications with MSXML6 and give us feedback on their experience.  Please email us at msxml4@microsoft.com  with feedback/questions/concerns.     Why:   We are going to kill-bit MSXML4 to ensure a secu......

27 of 116 | Upgrading to MSXML 6.0 -               Contents Upgrading to MSXML 6.0. 1 1.       Abstract 1 2.       Installation & Upgrade. 2 3.       Security Migration – Understanding Off-By-Default 3 4.       Improving W3C XSD 1.0 Conformance & Compatibility with System.Xml 2.0: Changes to the XmlSchemaCache: 7 5.       Obsolete features/Classes. 8     Abstract   Microsoft Core XML Services (MSXML) 6.0 is the current version of the core XML stack in the COM / Scripting environment.  ......

28 of 116 | XML in VB9 on Channel 9 - Check out the Webcast: The next version of VB .Net adds Xml as a built in data type using the new LINQ to XML API. As a built in data type, VB 9.0 provides the ability to create XML using XML Literals and to query XML documents using XML properties. This webcast contains a demo by David Schach, the lead developer in this project, of creating a program to share pictures over the internet. ...

29 of 116 | Streaming with LINQ to XML - Part 1 - This is the first of a multi-post series on how to use LINQ to XML in scenarios that require streaming over a large input and/or output data source rather than loading a document into memory, processing it, and saving it. A considerable number of XML users are faced with a dilemma: they are asked to process very large data sources, but their tools (such as DOM and XSLT) assume that the data can be loaded into an in-memory tree. The option of simply writing smaller files may not be available or appropriate. For example, XML is increasingly used as a format for database dumps and logfiles which are intrinsically large. The only currently supported option  in the .NET environment is to u......

30 of 116 | The new LINQ to XML “Bridge Classes” to System.Xml - In a previous post we presented an overview of the XML Features in the "Orcas" Community Technology Preview. This post gives some more details and examples for what we call the "bridge classes" that let one use other System.Xml APIs over a LINQ to XML tree. For example, LINQ to XML users can now create a tree in memory with an XmlWriter application or as the output of an XSLT transformation, validate a loaded tree against an XSD schema, use XPath 1.0 to query and XSLT 1.0 to transform the tree, and so forth. Why do this? Can't a developer already do anything with a LINQ query that can be done with XPath? Doesn't the combination of LINQ queries and functional construction do more o......

31 of 116 | February CTP of Visual Studio "Orcas" / .NET 3.5 is out - The Community Technology Preview of the next version of the .NET components that the XML team ships is ready for download.  It is available in two forms: a self-extracting installer that will setup a version of Visual Studio that can co-exist side by side with VS 2005, and a Virtual PC image. The new stuff includes: XML Tools: XSLT Debugger Enables Input Data Breakpoints allowing the user to break the execution of the style-sheet whenever a certain node in input document is hit. XML Editor Performance Improvements Performance in the Xml Editor for Intellisense, schema validation etc is improved by implementing incremental parsing of the XML Document. Seamless transit......

32 of 116 | Some things on the radar .... - There are a few things we've seen recently that you might want to take note of: Daylight Savings Time Changes This isn't related to XML, but we're trying to spread the word fairly widely.  The US has changed the dates for daylight savings time starting this year.  You need to make sure your PCs and other devices have been updated to handle this properly:  Windows Update will take care of this, but we realize that not everyone has that turned on;  Windows Mobile devices require some manual intervention. See http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst XML Tools in Visual Studio 2005 Webcast Join this webcast to learn more about the XML editing and Exten......

33 of 116 | VB 9.0 Xml in Visual Studio "Orcas" February CTP - In February CTP you will find the same functionality as in the May CTP with many improvements. Some of these improvements came from the feedback of extensive usability studies we conducted in the fall. Observing the obstacles users encountered provided us with good ideas on how to improve the Xml integration features. Some of these ideas are already included in this CTP and we are currently working on others. We also improved substantially the quality of the implementation with the help of our excellent test team who wrote comprehensive automated tests suites. You will find the following improvements in the February CTP compare with the May 2006 CTP: Attribute axis property is string Th......

34 of 116 | Standalone XQuery Implementation in .NET? - XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 are now W3C Recommendations, thanks in part to the contributions of  several Microsoft employees over the years. An earlier draft of the XQuery specification is supported in SQL Server 2005 , and you can send an XQuery to the server using the ADO.NET that shipped in Visual Studio 2005.  These features are becoming widely used.    Now that the XQuery family of specifications is complete, it’s fair to ask what our implementation plans might be,  We had been working on an implementation of XQuery in the .NET Framework that operated over standalone XmlDocuments several years ago, and showed the work in progress in the first beta of what b......

35 of 116 | XML Features in the February CTP of Visual Studio “Orcas” - We're nearly code complete on the next version of Visual Studio, and will soon be releasing a Community Technology Preview (CTP) so that you can take a look, work on prototypes, and think about how the new features might fit into your development plans. This is the first Orcas CTP that has feature parity with the May 2006 CTP, which was built with prototype code rather than production code. We have spent the last 9 months in a very extensive process of reviewing designs and code, thoroughly testing implementations and fixing bugs that were discovered, performing usability studies, and so forth. Likewise, this is the first Orcas CTP that can be installed side by side Visual Studio 2005 – n......

36 of 116 | XSLT 2.0 - We are pleased to note that XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 are now W3C Recommendations.  Microsoft contributed thousands of person-hours to the W3C efforts that developed these standards and is committed assist with the further development of XML standards at W3C.  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 ......

37 of 116 | Converting iTunes playlists to Zune playlists using VB 9.0 - It has been a while since my last post and I apologize for that. There was a lot of work going on in getting the xml integration in VB into production quality. In this blog I would like to share with you a fun little demo I wrote for Xml 2006 conference. The scenario for the demo is that my wife and I are sharing the same PC at home. She has iPod and I just recently got myself a Zune player. My wife likes creating playlists in iTunes from our shared library of MP3s that I would like to listen to in my Zune. So I decided to write a little app that converts iTunes playlist to a Zune playlist. It turns out that doing so is a pretty straightforward Xml transformation since iTunes keeps its l......

38 of 116 | XML Team at XML 2006 Conference - Several of us will be at the XML 2006 Conference this week in Boston. If you are around, drop by to say hello ... Stan Kitsis will be giving a talk on on XML Schema adoption based on a study done in collaboration with the University of Michigan Business School. Is XML Schema usage observably increasing? Who is authoring schemas? (Developers? DBA's? Analysts? Who else?) Who is consuming schemas? What tools are used to author and consume schemas? What other meta-data languages are used in the same corporation? The study at hand covered these and some more questions. Ralf Lämmel is giving two talks.  One looks at the question of how to cleanly extend tree-oriented APIs such as LINQ to X......

39 of 116 | Typed XML programmer -- Welcome to LINQ! - Announcing the LINQ to XSD Preview   Ever since PDC 2005, when XLinq was unleashed (now called LINQ to XML), we have been receiving questions about the possibility of a typed XML programming approach in the LINQ world. Not surprisingly, we have been pondering about this problem indeed. This was also mentioned in the XLinq overview. For some time now we have been focusing incubation efforts on typed XML programming for LINQ. One overall approach is to engage in a mapping of XML types to ‘plain’ object types, that is, classes with ‘fields that maintain state’ and with support for XML serialization and de-serialization. While this approach would effectively reduce typed XML programming ......

40 of 116 | People are reflecting on XML after 10 years - Although XML wasn't officially released as a W3C Recommendation until February 1998, the effort that led to it began about 10 years ago.  One recent anniversary is the first public working draft released on November 14, 1996.    Another is its first public presentation at the SGML 1996 conference; the XML 2006 conference is being held and the same location and will include a retrospective by Jon Bosak, chair of the original XML WG.   The IBM Systems Journal even has as special issue Celebrating 10 Years of XML. Yet as the Slashdot thread that dissects it makes clear, not everyone is  celebrating.  (The most memorable bit is Ti......

41 of 116 | Typed XML programmer -- What’s your scale of typing? - “Typed XML programmer, where have you have been in the last few weeks?” This series of blog posts has been stuck because I attended a bunch of conferences and workshops, and I was really busy with an incubation project on typed XML programming (see later in this series). I admit that I also worked on untyped XML programming -- the streaming part of it -- cool stuff … I will be writing about it when I get a chance.     Executive summary   XML programmer -- here is your scale of typing:   Text. Syntactically correct XML data. Well-formed XML data. Validated XML data. Intellisensially typed XML literals and XML queries. Static types for XML data in objects wit......

42 of 116 | An XML Team Introduction: Aaron Dunnington - Greetings! My name is Aaron Dunnington. Recently, I have joined the Data Programmability XML team as a Program Manager focused on XML readers and writers. I am so excited to work with and learn from such a tremendously talented, passionate team that is extraordinarily focused on deeply understanding your needs as well as delivering great products to make your life easier as an XML developer! Over the past year, I was a member of the Windows Live team. In specific, I worked within the Desktop Client group on model based engineering systems. Prior to joining Microsoft, I worked as a Software Engineer for StrikeIron, Inc., a software startup focused on developing products and subscription-ba......

43 of 116 | Using the right version of MSXML in Internet Explorer - I’ve been working closely with the IE team leading up to the release of IE7 and looking at the use of XML in the browser.  During this investigation one thing has become immediately obvious – there is a lot of confusion around the versioning story for MSXML and how to instantiate the “right” MSXML object in the browser.  Here’s a quick snippet of code that I’ve seen all too often out on the web:   if (Web.Application.get_type() == Web.ApplicationType.InternetExplorer) {         var progIDs = [ 'Msxml2.DOMDocument.6.0', 'Msxml2.DOMDocument.5.0', 'Msxml2.DOMDocument.4.0', 'Msxml2.DOMDocument.3.0', 'Msxml2.DOMDocument' ];   ......

44 of 116 | Some Recognitions - We were very happy to note that "DonXml" Demsak won the Visual Studio Extensibility Plugin Contest with his XPathMania plugin. This enhances the VS 2005 XML editor to highlight the nodes that would be selected by an XPath expression.  A great way to learn XPath, or debug a tricky expression in your SelectNodes() or XSLT code.  I'd also like to recognize a very useful article that our colleague Sinan Ussakli wrote for MSDN. This addresses one of the most frequently asked questions in the XML world - how do you work with XML namespaces in XPath/XSLT?  If you are seeking recognition, there are a couple of opportunities at the XML 2006 Conference. If you are a studen......

45 of 116 | XML Notepad 2006 - XML Notepad 2006 provides a simple intuitive User Interface for browsing and editing XML documents.  XML Notepad shows how to use some advanced features of System.XML in the .NET Frameworks 2.0.  The download includes source code. See the handy design doc that goes with it.  Features include: Tree View synchronized with Node Text View for quick editing of node names and values. Incremental search (Ctrl+I) in both tree and text views, so as you type it navigates to matching nodes. Cut/copy/paste with full namespace support. Drag/drop support for easy manipulation of the tree, even across different instances of XML Notepad and from the file system. Infinite undo/redo......

46 of 116 | XML Standardization Organizations and Processes - There's been a lot of unhappiness about the W3C floating around recently, well-summarized by Dare Obasanjo. Most of us involved with XML at Microsoft share a good bit of the general frustration, if not the specific complaints, expressed in these posts.  I don't think there's a strong consensus across the various people and teams on what the problems and solutions really are, but I think many would agree with a few points: The process really isn't stacked in favor of anybody, including the "multinationals with expense accounts."  The process stresses consensus, with numerous opportunities for those whose views are not reflected in the consensus to appeal to Sir Tim  to e......

47 of 116 | Typed XML programmer -- What are your pains today? - This post continues the series on “Typed XML programmer -- Where do you want to go tomorrow?”. This time, let’s ponder about ‘the 1st generation of typed XML programming’. What are the imperfections of the 1st generation? (Thanks for your feedback so far. In particular, I loved Bill's thoughts on ‘XML as a true first-class citizen’ and the behavior that is to be associated with such ‘XML in objects’. Bill, do not spoil my story any further; I am getting there!)   Definitions of typed XML programming   Let me recall my simple definition of typed XML programming that I offered previously: “Typed XML programming is XML programming in mainstream OO languages like C#, Java and VB ......

48 of 116 | Typed XML programmer -- What are your pains today? - This post continues the “Typed XML programmer” series of blog posts. This time, let’s ponder about ‘the 1st generation of typed XML programming’. What are the imperfections of the 1st generation? (Thanks for your feedback so far. In particular, I loved Bill's thoughts on ‘XML as a true first-class citizen’ and the behavior that is to be associated with such ‘XML in objects’. Bill, do not spoil my story any further; I am getting there!)   Definitions of typed XML programming   Let me recall my simple definition of typed XML programming that I offered previously: “Typed XML programming is XML programming in mainstream OO languages like C#, Java and VB while leveraging XML ......

49 of 116 | LINQ to XML in action - We're starting to see some real applications that demonstrate how easy it is to use LINQ to XML (I'm just gonna keep abbreviating it "XLinq") to get real XML work done without too much sweat or tears. One from a team member is Eric White's Parsing WordML using XLinqRecently, I had a problem where there wasn't a code testing harness that would do exactly what I wanted. I want to grab my code snippet directly from my word document, compile it, run it, and validate the output.  In more technical terms, I want to parse some WordML to grab text formatted with a given style. Further, I want to put a comment on the first line of the formatted text, and be able to grab the comm......

50 of 116 | Rounding up some XML Team new blogs and posts - You've seen Ralf Lämmel's post starting a series about our research and prototyping efforts to improve support for typed XML programming.  You might also wish to keep track of Ralf's weblog which will talk about these efforts in more detail as well as the diverse other things that are on his mind.  My favorite tidbit his his comparison of COBOL and XSD ... technologies that are scorned by the cognoscenti but adopted wholesale by the masses. There's even more intriguing stuff at his Amsterdam homepage.   Another team member with a (new?) blog is Anton Lapounov.  His post  XslCompiledTransform slower than XslTransform? summarizes what the XSLT t......