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Project Description
XML Explorer is an extremely fast, lightweight XML file viewer. It can handle extremely large XML files. It has been tested on files as big as 300MB. It allows fast viewing and exploration, copying of formatted XML data, evaluation of XPath expressions, and XSD schema validation.

An expression library is included to store and manage commonly-used XPath expressions, much like Bookmarks in FireFox. It supports multiple document tabs, with support for middle-clicking to close tabs, and fully-featured, Visual Studio-style dockable panes.

XML Explorer does not currently have any edit capabilities. If you need to edit XML files, I highly recommend the excellent XML Notepad.

For more information and a walk-through of the code, see the Code Project article at http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/XmlExplorer.asp.

XML Explorer uses DockPanel Suite, a docking library for .NET Windows Forms development which mimics Visual Studio .NET. Many thanks to the contributors of the project!

Performance

I've compared the times required to load XML files of varying size. XML Notepad was used for comparison, since it's nice enough to provide load times in the status bar. I realize the comparison isn't exactly fair, as XML Notepad is an XML editor. I trust you will find a place in your XML toolbox for both applications, as I have.

File Size	XML Notepad	XML Explorer
47.4 MB	48.68 seconds	4.94 seconds
31.3 MB	18.46 seconds	3.63 seconds
30.96 MB	16.47 seconds	2.89 seconds
3.69 MB	1.55 seconds	.32 seconds
281 KB	.35 seconds	.04 seconds

As you can see, the difference is greatest on extremely large files. On the more normal sized files, the difference is barely noticeable.

Memory

XML Explorer also makes much more efficient use of RAM, by utilizing XPathDocument (instead of XmlDocument), and by loading the XML document into the display on-demand.

File Size	XML Notepad	XML Explorer
47.4 MB	563.3 MB RAM	126.1 MB RAM
31.3 MB	322.98 MB RAM	73.92 MB RAM
3.69 MB	51.87 MB RAM	14.04 MB RAM
281 KB	12.87 MB RAM	6.85 MB RAM

-Jason Coon

Last edited Feb 14 at 2:37 PM by jcoon, version 15

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Downloads

Current release:

2.0.2 Release

Sun Feb 15 2009 at 7:00 AM, Beta Beta: This software is probably stable enough for use

3323 downloads

More info

Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

Preamble

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