There was a new XQuery working draft released on September 15th - hopefully the last before it becomes a Recomendation, but it hardly caused a ripple in the .NET developer world. Microsoft had released an alternative Xml query technology - XLinq a few days earlier at the PDC. XLinq will provide “language-level” integration with C# and VB.NET and seems (at casual glance) to provide all the querying capabilites that XQuery provides. XLinq is un-encumbered by standardization efforts, while XQuery has been evolving since 2001 and has still not reached recomendation status. With Michael Brundage (who architected the XQuery implementation in .NET framework 2.0 before it was pulled) now working on the XBOX team (and without many nice things to say about his XQuery experiences) this leaves just the SQL team with any kind of stake in XQuery (SQL 2005 will ship with an implementation of an earlier XQuery working draft). This makes me wonder if we will ever see a .NET XQuery implementation from Microsoft.
http://blogs.msdn.com/xmlteam/archive/2005/12/19/505753.aspx
Just replace all instances of "XSLT 2.0" with "XQuery".
The thing is, I think XQuery’s too hard for hobbyists to implement fully, or with decent perf. Maybe if there’s money to made a company will implement it (like Saxon), but I’m skeptical XQuery’s going to go anywhere – in .NET or out of it.
If the W3C had finished it back in 2002 as first planned, maybe it would have gained more traction. As it is, it’s four years later and the world has figured out XML and SQL and moved on.
Just my $0.02.