XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference, 4th Edition

Appendix D. Microsoft XSLT Processors

This appendix contains summary information about Microsoft's XSLT processors.

At the time of writing, Microsoft does not yet have an XSLT 2.0 processor, so the information in this appendix all relates to its XSLT 1.0 products. In view of this, I am not including a comprehensive specification of Microsoft's APIs, merely an outline of their structure. The reference information can be found in Microsoft's own documentation, or in books that concentrate on XSLT 1.0 processing.

The best information available on Microsoft's future plans comes in a blog posting released just after XSLT 2.0 was finalized, at http://blogs.msdn.com/xmlteam/archive/2007/01/29/xslt-2-0.aspx. All this really does is to confirm that Microsoft has a development team in place to work on an implementation, but this represents a significant turnaround given that two years earlier Microsoft was saying it thought XQuery would meet all the requirements, and more recently that the way forward was its proprietary Linq to XML language. It's likely to be 2009 at the earliest before we see a full product release, though hopefully there will be previews earlier than this.

The announcement suggests Saxon on .NET as an interim solution. A recommendation from Microsoft is not something I would have dared to hope for when I started out on the project!

Microsoft offers two families of products, with completely different APIs. The XSLT processor in the MSXML family comes as standard with Internet ...