I’ve been a fan of XML Spy for years due to its excellent support for editing, schemas, DTDs, XSLT debugging, etc.  A few days ago XML Spy 2005 came out and I was happy to see it had several new features in it (see a complete feature matrix here:  http://www.xmlspy.com/matrix_entsuite.html) that further enhance productivity.   Here’s a short list of some of the new features:

·         Support for the latest version of the XSLT 2.0/Xpath 2.0.

·         XQuery 1.0 support.

·         The StyleVision product (included in the enterprise bundle…can generate HTML, RTF, or PDF from a single XML document) generates XSLT 2.0 compliant stylesheets if desired.  You can switch between XSLT 1.0 and 2.0 stylesheets with the click of a button.  They also provide a stand-alone transformation component that can be used for XSLT 2.0 transformations.

·         The WYSIWYG schema editor has been enhanced but one nice change I noticed is the addition of attributes to the visual schema view.

·         For those working with large numbers of schemas they ship a free product called SchemaAgent server that acts as a repository and makes integrating/including schemas easier.  Here’s an image showing integrating schemas with the SchemaAgent server:

·         The XSLT debugger has been enhanced to support XSLT 2.0 stylesheet debugging.

·         XQuery 1.0 debugging capability.

·         VS.NET plug-in means you can work with XSLT 2.0 and XQuery right in VS.NET.

I haven’t had time to run through every new feature but I’m impressed to this point with the features I have tried.  Although I don’t plan to integrate XSLT 2.0 or XQuery 1.0 capabilities into any current apps (not until the specs are finally approved), having the ability to start playing around with these very cool XML technologies using an editor I’m already familiar with is great!