XML Editors?

[Martin Z]

Hi, I'm just working on a hobbyhorse command-line app for modders on
TA-Spring. The app is configured using XML deserialization, and I've
generated XSD to make designing the confuration XML files easier... and
in Visual Studio it's relatively painless.

The problem is that I want to be able to use this app without editing
the XML in Visual Studio, and whipping up a whole configuration program
would be a terrible PITA for a little hobbyhorse app. So does anyone
know of a good XML editor that supports using XSD for
intellisense/validation in a user-friendly way? The configuration is
pretty much snap-together building of the tree of configuration
objects, so an XML editor that could reflect this to the user would be
nice.

 

[Martin Honnen]

Martin Z wrote:

The problem is that I want to be able to use this app without editing
the XML in Visual Studio, and whipping up a whole configuration program
would be a terrible PITA for a little hobbyhorse app. So does anyone
know of a good XML editor that supports using XSD for
intellisense/validation in a user-friendly way? The configuration is
pretty much snap-together building of the tree of configuration
objects, so an XML editor that could reflect this to the user would be
nice.

You might want to check whether "XML notepad 2006", a .NET 2.0 application
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnxmlnet/html/xmlnotepad.asp>
does what you want.

 

[Martin Z]

Been trying it out.. so fare, tried XML Notepad and Jaxe. Jaxe just
doesn't seem to like MS's autogenerated XSD, and XML Notepad doesn't
handle abstract types well. If I have an element defined as an
abstract type in it's XSD, and the XML implementation includes a
non-abstract type in it's XSI:Type attribute, then XML Notepad declares
it invalid and gives up on autocomplete. I'm starting to think the
only XML editor that actually can autocomplete autogenerated DotNet
XSD/XML is Visual Studio itself.

Heheh, is MS ever planning on releasing a stripped-down redistributable
version of Visual Studio Express with only the XML/XSD authoring
features?