Workarounds to Version Independence

At least two solutions exist for working around the removal of version independence in MSXML 5.0.

• If you are developing for the Windows XP platform, you must use the new side-by-side installation technology to provide manifests for MSXML 5.0 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 your 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 50, you should complete the following steps:

1. Manually update the MSXML 5.0 manifest to make the new object imitate older versions.
2. Generate a manifest for your application and edit it to use MSXML 5.0 instead of MSXML 4.0, 3.0, or 2.0.

For more information, see MSXML 5.0 and Windows XP, and the Windows XP Side-by-Side installation documentation.

Note   If you are running Windows 2000, you might be able use Windows Side-by-Side installation 1.0. However, this option has not been tested with MSXML.

Implementing MSXML 5.0 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

GUID and ProgID Information | Why Version-Independent GUIDs and ProgIDs Were Removed | Assessing the Impact to Your Environment | MSXML 5.0 GUIDs and ProgIDs | Dependencies in MSXML 5.0