Recently I noticed that the support for XSLT in Visual Studio .Net 2003 was all but lousy. The XSLT functionality worked fine for simple XSL’s in VS 2003, but the XSL would sometimes fail to load if it was a bit more complex, even if it was W3C compliant.
XslTransform.Load routinely throws exceptions for no good reason.
Visual Studio .Net 2005 seems to have addressed the some of the XSLT compatibility issues. And at least for the XSL’s I was using, they all worked fine in 2005. One other benefit is that you can step through the XSL’s visually, which makes the debugging process much more pleasant.
Sometimes I wondered why such incomplete functionalities would appear in a production product. Maybe it is a way for Microsoft to force developers move to newer versions…
