Signs on the Sand

Yes, I'm trying to change the way you work with XSLT in Microsoft Visual Studio. It must be a pleasure to develop and rocket fast at runtime. Yes, Visual Studio already supports editing, running and even debugging XSLT, but it's still a painfully limited support. So I'm started building IronXSLT - Visual Studio plugin aimed to provide total integration of the XSLT language in Visual Studio IDE.

Current list of planned and already implemented IronXSLT features includes:

1. XSLT Library Project (Visual Studio project type for compiling XSLT into DLL)
2. XSLT Refactorings
3. Multiple XSLT engines
4. XSLT Profiler
5. Extensive library of XSLT code snippets
6. XPath Intellisense
7. Visual XSLT builder
8. XSLT2XLinq and XLinq2XSLT converters

IronXSLT version 0.1 implements first point.

IronXSLT supports only forthcoming Microsoft Visual Studio version, codenamed "Orcas", which is about to be released later this year. That also makes IronXSLT ship date.

IronXSLT is free for personal and commercial usage, but not open source currently.

If you happens to have Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” Beta 1 installed,  you can give IronXSLT version 0.1 a shot.

Needless to say, any comments, bug reports and feature requests are greatly appreciated on the IronXSLT Forum.

I decided not to call it Visual XSLT to avoid confusion with ActiveState Visual XSLT plugin, which was discontinued back in 2005, but still might be trademarked. And as I was obviously copying a lot from the IronPython integration sample in Visual Studio SDK, IronXSLT name became a natural choice.  I like this name.

Here are go some screenshots and information about IronXSLT.

Installation

You know, just run the installer. Once installed, IronXSLT adds itself into a list of installed products appearing on the Visual Studio splash and About dialogs:

 

Note: if you have lots of Visual Studio plugins installed, IronXSLT may not appear in the splash dialog, because of lack of the screen estate.

 

 

XSLT Library Project

IronXSLT adds "XSLT Library" to the list of Visual Studio project types:

XSLT Library project allows to compile XSLT stylesheets into DLL. Each XSLT stylesheets becomes a class in the DLL and can be loaded and run later using standard XslCompiledTransform class. This way you can avoiding paying XSLT compilation tax at runtime.
XSLT Library project has the following properties:

• Assembly Name - name of the resulting DLL
• Default Namespace - target default namespace for compiled XSLT stylesheets

Build XSLT Library project as usual. If there are any compilation error, they will appear in the Error List window, again as usual.

 

Enjoy!