Altova has announced that Altova XMLSpy 2006 includes full support for the newly released Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. From directly within the Visual Studio 2005 development environment, developers can easily access the advanced functionality of  XMLSpy 2006 to build powerful XML-based applications.

Altova XMLSpy is the industry standard XML development environment for modeling, editing, debugging and transforming all XML-related technologies, then automatically generating runtime code from schemas in multiple programming languages. In addition to Visual Studio 2005 integration, the new 2006 version contains updated XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, and XQuery support in compliance with the latest World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Working Drafts released on September 15, 2005, as well as schema-awareness in its XSLT 2.0 and XQuery engines.

Similar to its support for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, XMLSpy 2006 provides "deep" integration with Visual Studio 2005. This gives Microsoft developers seamless access to the editing views and development tools of XMLSpy 2006 in the same environment where they develop .NET Frameworkbased applications.

"Altova XMLSpy is widely recognized as a leader in XML development tools, and we're pleased to see the level of integration with Visual Studio 2005 that it provides," said Christopher Flores, group product manager of the .NET Developer Product Marketing Group at Microsoft Corp. "As developers continue to take advantage of XML and XML-related technologies, it is important that they have immediate access to proven tools that will make their work easier and more productive."

"Microsoft Visual Studio is one of the most popular multi-purpose development environments on the market , and Altova XMLSpy is the tool that most developers turn to for working with XML and related technologies," said Tim Hale, Director of Marketing for Altova. "By providing direct access to XMLSpy 2006 from Visual Studio 2005, we are unifying the best of both worlds and giving developers a real productivity enhancing solution."