RE: Steve Ballmer is cracking up

[Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>]

> is the functionality of MSXML 4.n because
> the food chain starts there.  True for me,
> and probably a few gazillion others.  Like

I would also add that I think the conformance of *all* vendors' products
on past XML standards like XSLT and XML DOM would have been much worse
without the input of people who discover spec conformance bugs being
persistent about getting that feedback through.  Vendors sometimes
attach more weight to customer complaints than to their own testers.
And another comment for people using the MS platform; the .NET Framework
SDK which just released Beta 2 for download on MSDN, should eventually
(sooner rather than later) replace MSXML as the start of the food chain.
This .NET SDK is what was formerly known as the Universal Runtime (URT)
and is the underlying class library for pretty much any .NET
(managed/common language runtime) code.  The System.Xml classes reside
in System.Xml.Dll and have managed code implementations of XML
manipulation APIs, XSD, etc.  I'm only pointing this out because many
people are unaware that there is a managed-code XML parser kit similar
to MSXML, and much internal MS development has switched to using these
classes.  This is not to say that MSXML is dead; it is just to say that
the System.Xml classes will be an increasingly large part of the
foodchain as time goes on.

Thanks,
Joshua