Update: via a follow-up comment from Mike Champion (to the post linked to below),
M. David was right in his O’Reilly blog … credit the people who ” kick, scream, and cry loud enough” not any particular person in Redmond. For example, we’ve noted how many comments Ralf gets on his LINQ to XSD posts. If you want us to do something new or different in the core XML technology area, you know what to do: comment here, post a private message to http://blogs.msdn.com/xmlteam/contact.aspx, blog about it, or do something else to make your opinion heard.
Or, in other words, if you don’t ask, you’re a lot less likely to get what you think you might want. Kicking, screaming, and crying (if necessary) can be helpful too ;) But unless you’re okay with being referred to as “that punk a$$ hacker with an attitude (who throw’s tempter tantrum’s if/when he doesn’t get his way!)” (which I’m personally okay with, btw…) then I don’t (necessarily) recommend its usage.
That said… Much like the choice of when to use SOAP over REST, or JSON over XML, use the tool that works (best) to get the job at hand done. I’ll leave the decision of which tool to use when as an exercise for the reader. ;)
[Original Post]
XmlTeam may not be much to look at,
But at this moment in time, by golly, I believe he/she is the most *BYOO-T-FULL* person in the world,
Monday, January 29, 2007 2:30 PM by XmlTeam
Microsoft XML Team’s WebLog : XSLT 2.0
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
So what kills me about all of this (the above “event” had been previously known to be in the works, so its of no great shock) is contained in the comment section of the above linked post,
# re: XSLT 2.0
Monday, January 29, 2007 7:07 PM by tzagotta
How does the work on XSLT 2.0 affect the probability of getting an XQuery implementation into the .NET Framework? I am kind of getting the impression that XQuery is not going to happen?
# re: XSLT 2.0
Monday, January 29, 2007 7:32 PM by Mike Champion
We will make a separate post about XQuery — the story is a bit more complicated, and we didn’t want to delay confirming that we are actively working on XSLT2 but that it will not appear in “Orcas.”
But the bottom line is that the probability depends partly on how much demand we see for querying *standalone* XML documents with an XQuery implementation separate from the one in SQL Server. By all means let us know your needs via the contact form.
“So”, you find yourself asking, “what?”
Me: That’s your question? Oh, wait, I see… “So what?”
You: Yeah, try an keep up there, ‘LittleHackerBoy Who *Wishes* He Could’, would ya!
Me: Wishes he could what?
You: HACK!
Me: Wow, that’s kind of bitter and hurtful. You haven’t gotten any for a while, have ya?
You: Gotten what?
Me: Exactly!
So, to my point…
From the original “Post Heard Round The (XML/XSLT) World”,
Published Thursday, May 13, 2004 12:04 AM by mfussell
One questions that I am getting more frequently is “Will the next release of System.Xml V2.0 support XSLT 2.0?”. The answer is “No”. It’s not that we do not love XSLT (see [1] and [2] below), in fact it has proven itself to be both a powerful and adaptable language, but a challenger has risen in the form of XQuery. Developers will soon have a choice to make. The XQuery 1.0 and the XSLT 2.0 specs have been produced in tandem and to a large extent both languages are simply different syntax manifestations for the same thing sharing both a common data model and type system. You can think about this in the same way that C# and VB.NET share the same types and Meta data via the CLR. XSLT 2.0, XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 are just the same query language dressed up in different forms. Learning one means that you can easily master the others.
However ultimately we made the decision that the non-XML syntax (or you could say more SQL like syntax) of XQuery was going to attract more developers in the long run, in the same way the developers on the whole find XPath an easier file-path like syntax to write. The next 5 years will tell whether this assertion was correct. This is also why we have shown little interest in XQueryX for that matter since it is, well, like XSLT 2.0 but less useful. (I predict that less that 0.001% of people will ever care about XQueryX which amounts to about 70 developers worldwide) Anyway back to the point at hand. XQuery is a nicer syntax to author by does not replace XSLT yet mainly from its inability to do template style pattern matching, but it will get there eventually. Certainly like VB and C# these languages will live side-by-side; people will tie themselves to their favorite language and go down dying to protect it.
Which then led to this, which then led to that, which would eventually lead to here, then here, then here, which would ultimately lead to,
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.
… all of which leads to one *VERY* important take away…
If you want something bad enough in life, if you kick, scream, and cry loud enough, eventually someones going to snatch the nearest bottle out of the nearest baby’s (with a bottle) mouth and stick it in yours just to get you to stop crying long enough to get some sleep!
Sleep well, my *BYOO-T-FULL* XmlTeam,
,
Sleep well. ;-)
—
NOTE: Of course, one could always argue that all of this would ultimately usher in the opportunity to bring LINQ into the world, but lets just leave that one where its at, and be thankful that with the above announcement, SQL Server 2005/SSE, LINQ, and (of course!) Saxon on .NET, we have all of the XML transformation and query languages all of our little hacker hearts could *EVER* possibly desire.
At least until something brighter and shinier comes along, anyway ;-)
Thank you XmlTeam! :D
