Archive | August 15, 2003

Answering earlier comments on Ken’s presentation, the XML/XSL editor he demoed was pretty impressive. Arnold Bilansky, who attended the day’s training, said Ken spent an (CORRECTION: half-)hour demonstrating it to them, but he only had 10 minutes at the end of a whirling two hour demonstration for us. (Ken had to get back to Boston for a 9 PM .NET User Group Meeting. Good thing he was on West Coast time!). Here’s what I recall:

• Color coded editor
• Support XSD, DTD and validates on the fly (little red squiggles under bad attributes and elements)
• Intellisense prompting based on XSD/DTD
• Tooltip prompts
• Preview window to view resultant XML/HTML from transform
• He also demonstrated a 3rd party SVG viewer (emphasizing that it wouldn’t ship with the package) and edited XML and showed the resulting SVG. Impressive.
• XSLT debugging using F5 and tracing line-by-line through the process.
• Expected to ship in “Whidbey” (VS.NET.Next) second half of next year.
• Possibly available as a standalone download in the first half of next year, but no promises. (CLARIFICATION: possibly available as a separate download, but still an add-on to the VS.NET IDE, not a stand-alone product – tr 18-Aug-2003 17:08 ET)

More as I recall it and check with others.

I purchased both Sonic Software’s Stylus Studio (update: corrected URL) and Dave’s WebSite’s XMLEditPro a few weeks ago. It seems to do most of the functionality, in terms of running XML through XSL into a result, and showing how lines of transforms affect the output, but it doesn’t have the slick Intellisense or tooltips, or at least I haven’t found them yet. But it may be a good interim solution to look at while we wait for Microsoft to catch up.