One of the hardest problems in software development is how to version software and data formats. One of the biggest problems for Windows for years has been DLL Hell which is a versioning problem. One of the big issues I have to deal with at work is how to deal with versioning issues when adding or removing functionality from classes.

For a few weeks, I've been planning to write up some guidelines and concerns for versioning XML formats based on my experiences and those of others at Microsoft. I've got some folks on the XML Web Services team interested in riding shotgun such as Gudge and Doug. It also looks like Edd Dumbill is interested in the abstract for the article, so it with any luck it should end up on XML.com when it is done.

I was reminded of the importance of writing this article when I saw a post on the atom-syntax list by Google's Steve Jensen which implied that it just occured to the folks at Google that they'd have to support multiple versions of ATOM. This is excarberated by the fact that they are deploying implementations based on draft specs. Like I said before, never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence