"p0" <yves.dhondt@g...> wrote in message 
news:7c04b348-2f49-444d-8256-3d4e0da81500@w......
> Dear all,
>
> I have a third-party program which calls a stylesheet and uses the
> returned output. The application uses the MSXML engine to do the
> transformations. Users are able to create their own stylesheets.
>
> Documentation of the XSLT format is sketchy at best, so trying to
> create my own stylesheet is rather difficult. I made one which does
> what I want for now but I want to look a bit deeper into it.
>
> My questions are:
>
> 1)Does MSXML allow somehow to debug the XSLT by stepping into it
> whenever it is called from the external program? Like, could I use
> Visual Studio 2008, put in some breakpoints, launch the app, and get
> it to break into Visual Studio 2008 on the stylesheet calls?
>
> 2)As the third-party program does not output xsl:message contents,
> does MSXML output it to somewhere by default? A simple file somewhere
> on my drive? Or maybe an eventlog? Or could I instruct it to do so for
> a while?
>
> 3)Is there a way to see what the XML is that is send together with the
> XSLT to the transformation engine?
>
> TIA,
>
> Yves
I don't know of anyway to debug MSXML in Visual Studio, you can debug 
XslCompiledTransform in VS, that's no help though.

I seem to recall that xsl:message only works if the terminate attribute is 
set to "yes", maybe making that up though.

You can always use the identity XSLT to see what was sent to the engine:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
  xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
  <xsl:template match="@*|node()">
    <xsl:copy>
      <xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/>
    </xsl:copy>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

-- 

Joe Fawcett (MVP - XML)
http://joe.fawcett.name