.NET 3.5 doesn't completely support XPATH 2.0 or XSLT 2.0, which is just too bad. Does anyone know if these two will be included and fully supported in any future .NET versions?
5 Answers
My understanding is that many Microsoft XML resources were diverted from XSLT 2.0 onto LINQ to XML, which - in my view - doesn't address the same problem-space as XSLT at all.
LINQ to XSD was supposed to enhance LINQ to XML (as well as XML Schema benefits, the syntax is less ugly), but this was open-sourced by Microsoft onto CodePlex some time ago and appears to have no community support.
Also, its unlikely that Microsoft would launch a new XSLT 2.0 processor without an XSLT 2.0 editor and debugger integrated into Visual Studio, so quite a bit of effort/time would be required to reverse their 'non-adoption' decision. [Update] There's now an XSLT 3.0 extension for Microsoft VSCode (managed by myself) that integrates with Saxon's 3.0 XSLT processor.
So instead we have Saxon.NET, which has an unimpeachable standards compliance reputation and provides excellent extensibility options for .NET.
Microsoft have no plans to release support for XPath/XSLT 2.0 in .NET.
XQSharp provides a 3rd party implementation of XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0 and XQuery for .NET.
[edit: XQSharp 2.0 beta (with XSLT 2.0) has been released]
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