New XSD Functionality in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta 1

We’re thrilled to announce that today the new XML Schema Explorer is included in the Orcas SP1 Beta release for Visual Studio 2008. We previously released a CTP showcasing a subset of the XML Schema Explorer functionality last August. Many of the people who downloaded and tried our August preview requested that we ship the functionality in Visual Studio 2008 and so we are. You can download the beta here.

The XML Schema Explorer illustrates our initial thinking about the future of XSD tools from Microsoft. Instead of working with strictly one XSD file in a text editor, the XML Schema Explorer allows you to view and work with an XML Schema Set, showing all XSDs imported and included in a hierarchal view.  The XML Schema Explorer offers tight integration with the XML Editor (allowing navigation seamlessly from Editor to XML Schema Explorer and back), the ability to search over the full schema set, the ability to show different views of a schema set (offering the ability to hide/show namespaces, files, as well as change schema set node ordering), the ability to general sample XML for global elements, and more. We are very much interested in gathering your feedback on the product, so please download the beta, give the feature set a try, and send us some feedback.

Over the next few weeks we’ll follow up with additional blog posts describing the functionality we’ve added in this release and discussing our future plans for adding to this start.

Please send us your comments, questions, and suggestions via the XML and the .NET Framework forum on MSDN here.

Thanks,

Tim Laverty

Program Manager, XML Tools