Workarounds to Version Independence

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At least two solutions exist for working around the removal of version independence in MSXML 4.0 and later.

  • If you are developing for the Windows XP platform, you must use the new side-by-side installation technology to provide manifests for the appropriate version of MSXML and your application. These manifests can simulate the effects of version independence or replace mode.

  • If you are developing to another Windows platform, you can typically change to version-dependent programming IDs in your Web script or other applications.

The following sections discuss these two situations and some workarounds for each.

Windows XP Side-by-Side Installation

If you are developing applications for Windows XP and want to continue to use MSXML version independence, the side-by-side installation technology provided with Windows XP allows individual applications to reference objects in whatever way you want them to.

Windows XP Side-by-Side installation works by using manifests. A manifest is a small XML file that describes a component or components of an application. This allows you to avoid lookups in the Windows registry, and provides efficient side-by-side functionality without affecting the entire Windows environment.

If you are interested in using side-by-side installation to simulate MSXML version independence or replace mode functionality for MSXML 4.0 or later, you should complete the following steps:

  1. Manually update the MSXML 4.0 or later manifest to make the new object imitate older versions.

  2. Generate a manifest for your application and edit it to use the desired version of MSXML instead of an earlier version.

For more information, see MSXML and Windows, and the Windows XP Side-by-Side installation documentation.

Implementing MSXML in Web Scripting

You should be aware that any linking to a style sheet file from an XML file that uses the <?xsl-stylesheet?> processing instruction will default to using either MSXML 2.0 or MSXML 3.0. However, you can write either server-side or client-side script to use MSXML 4.0 and later versions instead.

For more information, see Initiate XSLT in a Script.

See Also

Concepts

GUID and ProgID Information
Why Version-Independent GUIDs and ProgIDs Were Removed
Assessing the Impact to Your Environment
MSXML 3.0 GUIDs and ProgIDs
MSXML 4.0 GUIDs and ProgIDs
MSXML 5.0 for Microsoft Office Applications GUIDs and ProgIDs
Dependencies in MSXML