News
Microsoft Jumps on Newly Published XML Schema
- By Scott Bekker
- 05/03/2001
As Tim Berners-Lee announced the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Recommendation of the XML Schema in Hong Kong, Microsoft Corp. jumped on the publication of the recommendation with three new developer toolkits and previews.
Microsoft, which is making a major bet on XML, positioned the W3C move as the next major step in XML after the release of the XML 1.0 specification.
"I think it's a pretty big win for the whole Web infrastructure," said Andrew Layman, Microsoft's XML Web Services Architect.
David Turner, Microsoft's senior program manager for XML technologies, says the XML Schema addresses two of the major obstacles to corporate application integration: that the native way of storing data was incompatible between any two systems and vague documentation.
"It is a language neutral way of writing it down, and it gives us a much more precise way of writing it down," Turner said of the XML Schema.
Microsoft made three products immediately available on MSDN Wednesday: SOAP Toolkit 2.0; MSXML 4.0 technical preview; and XML for Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Web release 2, beta 1 (SQLXML).
The SOAP Toolkit is an add-on to Visual Studio 6.0 for simplifying development of SOAP-based applications that now supports the XML Schema.
MSXML, Microsoft's XML parser, adds XML Schema support and provides for integration of additional parsing models.
SQLXML adds support for mapping XML documents to SQL databases using XSD schemas and a new SQLXML OLE DB provider. – Scott Bekker
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.