1) .NET 3.5 sites can use LINQ for friendlier navigation of XML files
2) XML is CMS vendor-independent. We like Tridion, but if we ever change vendors, the content is available. Additionally, XML files don’t rely on the Tridion broker.
3) For teams that like XSLT, it could be used either on the Tridion or .NET side.

We even have a news page where the original solution was XML-driven and used XSLT to create the html markup. We just swapped out the existing XML from Tridion. Because the component template is also XSLT, it’s: Component to CP (via XSLT) to XML page to HTML (via XSLT). Not the best way to make it from scratch, but the change was nearly seamless.

We have run into a challenge, though, on how to handle XML files that contain a large set of content through a component that links to other components (index). When an item is updated, the entire set of content is published.

We’re looking at a few options:
* single xml config file (current)
* dynamic broker calls
* individual .xml files (or maybe pages)
* .NET .ascx dynamic component presentations

We have 4 development teams and started Tridion development by training a dev per team and getting the others on board.

And while we do use XML-published files (for content, config files, etc), it’s disconcerting to find “non-Tridion-trained” devs editing some of these files directly! Ugh.

The other challenges are getting the teams to recognize the XML files need to be excluded from site (presentation server) publishing. And for sites that are adding CMS slowly, recognizing which files come from Tridion.

I can highly recommend the xml publishing strategy. We have used it for the new portal of a big cable giant in the Netherlands. It proved to be a big success. In this particular project we took the idea one step further and delivered a Webservice only which feeds content to a certain portal product.

In addition I am rebuilding kvk.nl using the xml publishing strategy. For this implementation I am reusing an almost finished implementation for an internal website. In my experience it is much easier to implement a .NET template then it is to implement a Tridion template.

My colleagues Chris and Jeroen are the .NET experts who created both solutions. I will ask them (again) to write a post about their experiences. It would almost certainly help if you could post your question on their blogs too

Jeroen mentioned that unit testing in Tridion is not impossible, but hard to do. I have not thought of a decent way to do unit testing in Tridion, but it sounds like there is a way — I would love to know what that is (at least for now until we can move to the XML approach).

Also, Albert, have you had any feedback from your colleagues on the .NET templating pros/cons?