BEA Systems has released the Streaming API for XML
(StAX) along with a reference implementation. This is a
Java-based, pull-parsing API for XML. StAX offers two approaches.
XMLStreamReader and XMLStreamWriter are
a cursor API designed to read and write XML as efficiently as
possible. XMLEventReader and
XMLEventWriter are an iterator API designed to be
easy to use, event based, easy to extend, and allow easy
pipelining. The iterator API sits on top of the cursor API.
This API isn't quite rigorous enough for my tastes. It allows implementations to miss well-formedness errors, generate malformed XML, and throw away information wiuthout notifying the client. However it's probably the best pull API yet.
ActiveState has released Visual XSLT 2.0, a payware XSLT plug-in for the Visual Studio .NET IDE. New features in version 2.0 include Just-In-Time (JIT) Debugging, and a Visual Schema Mapper. Commercial licenses for Visual XSLT 2.0 are $295. Upgrades are $99.95.