Ken Levy from MS is showing us some new XML tools that might be available in the Visual Studio .NET Whidbey release. These are still very much "in flux."

One neat "coming soon": Altova's XMLSpy will ship with an add-in from Visual Studio.NET.

The new XML Editor has improved syntax highlighting. The editor will give you red squigglies under elements and attributes that do not follow general XML syntax rules. These errors pop up in the Task List and provide detailed error messages, just like syntax errors in other compiled languages.

Intellisense will also pick up external DTD/Schema references and retrieve them from remote locations. So, if you have an xsi:SchemaLocation pointing to an XSD file somewhere out in the web, the Visual Studio XML editor is smart enough to retrieve the schema and validate against it while you're editing your doc.

"Create Schema" support for generating XSD schemas from DTD files.

Namespace-aware Intellisense!!! Think of how Intellisense works for C#, and extend that to arbitrary

Integrated viewing of XSLT results.

DEBUGGABLE XSLT! Yup, you can now set breakpoints within an XSLT transform. They're actually compiling XSLT into IL code, which is how the debugger can hook into the transform. This offers "multiple X" performance gains. Also, the Whidbey framework is going to support the dynamic compilation of XSLT on the fly -- kind of like the way you can compile RegEx's dynamically for performance.

Ken did the entire demo in Visual Studio 2003. The new XML editor is actually an add-in for Visual Studio, which mean's it's not technically Whidbey-dependent. Keep your eye on http://gotdotnet.com/team/xmltools