I’ve always thought XMLSpy was a great product. Unfortunately, today I discovered the caveat that you have to spend lots of $$$ on it to be impressed.

I just bought a copy of XMLSpy 2009 Standard ($129) after evaluating 2009 Enterprise ($999), since that’s the version that the free trial links go to. Anyway, I’m highly disappointed about the read-only grid view and read-only schema view in the Standard edition. The schema editor is pretty cool and unique, so I can understand it being Pro-level ($499), but it’s pretty lame to have the grid read-only. I work at a small company, so I couldn’t justify $370 for grid view anyway, but I probably would have stuck with free XML Notepad had I known.