Overview of XML tools in Visual Studio
Applies to: 
Visual Studio 
Visual Studio for Mac
Note
This article applies to Visual Studio 2017. If you're looking for the latest Visual Studio documentation, see Visual Studio documentation. We recommend upgrading to the latest version of Visual Studio. Download it here
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that provides a format for describing data. XML separates the data and its presentation by using associated style sheets such as Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) and cascading style sheets (CSS). Visual Studio includes tools and features that make it easier to work with XML, XSLT, and XML schemas.
XML editor
The XML editor is used to edit XML documents. It provides full XML syntax checking, schema validation while you type, color-coding, and IntelliSense. If a schema or document type definition is provided, it is used by IntelliSense to list allowable elements and attributes.
Additional features include:
XML snippet support, including schema-generated snippets
Document outlining so that elements can be expanded and collapsed
The ability to execute XSLT transformations and to view the results as text, XML, or HTML
The ability to generate XML Schema definition language (XSD) schemas from the XML instance document
Support for editing XSLT style sheets, including IntelliSense support
XML Schema Explorer
XML Schema Designer
The XML Schema Designer is integrated with Visual Studio and the XML editor to enable you to work with XML schema definition language (XSD) schemas.
XSLT debugging
Visual Studio supports debugging XSLT style sheets. Using the debugger, you can set break points in an XSLT style sheet, step into an XSLT style sheet from code, and so on.
Note
The XSLT debugger is only available in the Enterprise edition of Visual Studio.