I attended a session hosted by Alan Griver a few weeks ago at the Israel C# Users Group (IVCUG).

It was a lovely talk, who's first part centered around the new XML features in VS 2005. Amazingly, I don't think I've heard anyone talk about these before, because most of it was brand new to me!

Here's a short list of the new cool stuff he talks about:

- XSL is actually compiled in IL, which means you can actually debug into XSLT statements. Which leaves me wondering - maybe someone should write a visualizer for XSL objects?

- There's a cool XML toolbar to let you do all sorts of cool stuff while editing and viewing XML files

- XML Snippets: This is a cool thing. Let's say you have an XML that contains something like this:

 1 <Person> <Name>Roy</Name></Person>

you can write this:

<Person

  and then press Tab. You'll get a "snippet" sort of popped into your code editor that looks like this:

 1 <Person> <Name>[Cursor]</Name></Person>

How cool?

- The properties window for an XML file contains a "schema" setting with a button that allows schema for the document form a bunch of preknown schemas (you can also add your own to this list).