Microsoft has seen the future, and it works!

Microsoft has acknowledged the incredible usefulness that XML provides. In SQL Server 7.5, you will be able to request your results set to come back in XML format with an attached schema.

In Microsoft BizTalk, XML is the chosen message structure because it can communicate and exchange data with other XML-aware systems. I like to think of BizTalk as the Swiss Army Knife for all businesses data processing needs and XML is the blade! For more information see: http://www.biztalk.org

WebDAV is another Microsoft technology making full use of XML. WebDAV uses XML to send information across the wire, and also uses XML as the format for property values. XML provides two major benefits to WebDAV, extensibility and internationalization. Since extra tags can be introduced anywhere in a stream of XML, we can extend the protocol, or extend our properties easily. Since XML supports multiple character sets, we can record property values which are readable by people from many different countries

Channel Definition Format (CDF) is an XML-based data format used in Internet Explorer 4.0 and Internet Explorer 5 browsers to describe Active Channel content and desktop components. It is used by thousands of content developers and millions of end users to describe collections of pages and data about pages, such as channel-bar.

All of these examples have one theme in common… they show how XML is the ideal middleware solution for communicating data. For more ideas on how XML is being used, take a look at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml