My latest article "Building Practical Solutions with EXSLT.NET" has been published at the MSDN XML Developer Center. This is an overview of the EXSLT.NET library and its extension functions from the practical XPath/XSLT programming point of view. Basically I wanted to show how to use EXSLT.NET functionality in practice, so I went through all EXSLT modules and showed how these functions can solve frequent XSLT problems such as multistep transformations, date and time manipulations, doing math, parsing and matching using regexp, calculating sets difference, intersection or getting distinct nodes, padding, splitting, tokenizing, replacing and other advanced string manipulations etc etc etc.
Comments are welcome!
EXSLT.NET is sort of answer to "No XSLT 2.0 in .NET???" question and as such it unexpectedly becomes more and more important. In recent Online Chat with Microsoft XML Team, Arpan Desai, Microsoft PM on XPath, XSLT, and XQuery stack said: "Although EXSLT.NET is not officially supported by Microsoft, we will endeavor to make sure it works ;)". Another question was about moving EXSLT.NET into the core System.Xml to make it available out of box, more performant and what's more important - to eliminate full trust security requirement. They said they are considering it. Meanwhile there are some bugs and improvements on EXSLT.NET I wanted to work on. For reasons beyond my control I've got some free time this week, so...
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