For the first time since 1997 and the first Microsoft XML toolkit / parser, I have had to hack into XML files using regular expressions (arrrrrg!) in order to get a valid XML document to load into Microsoft XML tools.

An example of this type of XML is:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE root [
<!ENTITY ns "http://www.some.com/schema">
]>
<root xmlns="&ns;">
<foo>Some foo</foo>
<bar>Some bar</bar>
</root>

The author of this type of XML is using a general entity to represent the default namespace uri. Both XmlDocument and XmlValidatingReader barf on this file with an error of:

System.ArgumentException: Prefixes beginning with "xml" (regardless of whether the characters are uppercase, lowercase, or some combination thereof) are reserved for use by XML.

So is this a valid XML document? Although using general entities in this way seems to be pushing the envelope a bit (Are namespaces part of the XML data or do they sit in a layer above the data?), I have seen quite a few examples in this style on the W3C site so I assume it is valid. So in order to deal with this type of XML, I have had to write code using tedious regular expressions to manually find and replace the offending entities prior to loading into .Net XML classes.

Which brings me to my point and request. How do I report this bug to the MS XML team? I have looked on Technet and MSDN but cannot find a way to do this.