Signs on the Sand

Here goes nxslt3.exe/NxsltTask v3.0. It's nxslt tool for .Net 3.5. It can do everything nxslt2/NxsltTask v2.3 can plus the ability to run compiled XSLT stylesheets.

Now short documentation about running compiled XSLT stylesheets.

Let's say you have a stylesheet called mytransform.xsl. First you compile it using nxsltc:

nxsltc mytransform.xsl /out:mytransform.dll

The result is mytransform.dll, containing mytransform class.

Now you can run it. Here is a full form:

nxslt3 document.xml -c mytransform -af mytransform.dll

-c option says you want to run compiled stylesheet. Instead of XSLT stylesheet file name you pass compiled stylesheet class name (fully qualified if it has a namespace). And you need to specify dll file, where compiled stylesheet can be found.

Of course if you can afford assume things you can make it shorter. If dll is named after stylesheet and can be found in the current directory, you can omit it:

nxslt3 document.xml -c mytransform

Alternatively if dll contains single compiled stylesheet you can specify dll and omit stylesheet:

nxslt3 document.xml -c -af mytransform.dll

If you happens to compile your stylesheets into a strongly named dll:

nxsltc mytransform.xsl /keyfile:d:\keys\test.snk

and then installed it into the GAC, you run it by specifying full or partial dll name after -an option:

nxslt3 document.xml -c -an "mytransform, Version=1.0.0.0, PublicKeyToken=b79508ebff528747"

This works too (partial name):

nxslt3 document.xml -c -an mytransform

That's about it.

And finally. nxslt3 is a free feature-rich .NET 3.5 XSLT command line utility and NAnt/MSBuild task which uses .NET XSLT processor - XslCompiledTransform class and supports XML Base, XInclude, XPointer, EXSLT, compiled stylesheets, embedded stylesheets, processing instruction, multioutput, custom URI resolving, custom extension functions, pretty printing, XHTML output, XSLT 2.0-like character maps and more.

nxslt3.exe/NxsltTask are free tools under BSD license. Download here.