The fourth incarnation of Microsoft's XML tools, MSXML 4, has been released as a "supported, production quality" release.

Improvements over the previous release, MSXML 3.0, include:

• Support for W3C XML Schema Recommendation
• Faster XSLT processing
• Faster SAX parser
• Removal of some none-standard legacy features (e.g. old version of XSLT, uuid namespaces in XDR)

It is possible to run MSXML4 in parallel with existing, or future, versions of the software.