I finally got around to reading the XML Files…

I finally got around to reading the XML Files article in the March issue of MSDN magazine this week. Now there wasn’t much new here (though I’m seeing an increasing number of references to XSLT as a functional programming language - I’m afraid I didn’t get that unit in my degree course so it proved to be true that I wouldn’t know a FPL even when it had been hitting me in the face for ages) but I hadn’t run into the XSLT 1.0 Extension mechanism directly before. I had used the [

](http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/xmlsdk/htm/xsl_elm_qz_4s50.asp) extension in the past and dismissed it for making poorly performing templates (using the active script engines) but with both MSXML4 and the .NET Framework classes you can provide compiled extensions. A reasonable solution for those times when you want to url encode strings in XSLT? Perhaps. And of course all those other little things you just wish were included in XPath.