Some time ago I was looking for a simple but powerful visual XML editor tool to introduce a “front-end” of my model-based keyword-driven test automation framework to non-technical team members and managers.

I finally selected MS XML Notepad, and this tool not only fulfilled my expectations but also made testers loving it so much that they started using it for their own needs as well.

However, XML Notepad is not only intended for XML tree visualization, drag-n-drop editing, and convenient find-replace. Here’s the full list of its capabilities as per overview provided on Microsoft web-site.

• Tree View synchronized with Node Text View for quick editing of node names and values.
• Incremental search (Ctrl+I) in both tree and text views, so as you type it navigates to matching nodes.
• Cut/copy/paste with full namespace support.
• Drag/drop support for easy manipulation of the tree, even across different instances of XML Notepad and from the file system.
• Infinite undo/redo for all edit operations.
• In place popup multi-line editing of large text node values.
• Configurable fonts and colors via the options dialog.
• Full find/replace dialog with support for regex and XPath.
• Good performance on large XML documents, loading a 3mb document in about one second.
• Instant XML schema validation while you edit with errors and warnings shown in the task list window.
• Intellisense based on expected elements and attributes and enumerated simple type values.
• Support for custom editors for date, dateTime and time datatypes and other types like color.
• Handy nudge tool bar buttons for quick movement of nodes up and down the tree.
• Inplace HTML viewer for processing xml-stylesheet processing instructions.
• Built-in XML Diff tool.
• Support for XInclude
• Dynamic help from XSD annotations.
• Goto definition to navigate includes and XSD schema information.