There seems to be some kind of software release frenzy at Redmond right now. Microsoft are spitting out application after application and I don’t mean the two huge ones; MIcrosoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Office (Server) System. Applications, small and big, like Internet Explorer 7, Windows Live Writer, XNA Game Studios, different Microsoft Live applications, Windows Desktop Search and now XML Notepad 2006 are dropping out from the software factory. It’s fun, but it takes me so much time reading and catching up on the releases.
XML Notepad 2006 is a small Windows application, built upon the Microsoft.NET 2.0 framework using the C# language by Chris Lovett, that provides “a simple and intuitive User Interface for browsning and editing XML documents”. My first reaction, before I downloaded it, was - yeah, great - finally a structured XML editor. But after installing it and running it for just few minutes I realized that this was not the software I was waiting for. It has a lot of good things;
-
Strucutred view of an
XML
document
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Schema validation
-
XSL
transformation
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Find and replace functionality
Ok, this looks fine at the first glance, but what I really wanted was a structured XML tree view with some kind of synchronized XML-source view. If you try to view the source then it just fires up Notepad. I think the current Tree View of XML Notepad 2006 with just the XML node text'’s are pretty useless.
I work a lot with XML documents of all types and usually use Visual Studio 2005 (or the Express products) to edit them, it works fine and I think I will still use VS2005 to edit XML documents or plain ol' Notepad.
It’s not all bad, it can be a good application if this is adressed as well as an intellisense based XML source editor. If I see to myself I find it somewhat easier to work with a text editor, but having the tree view at hand will allow me to navigate through the documents faster.
You should give it a try and download it here.