Visual Studio Hacks

Generate Strongly Typed DataSets #49

Chapter 6, Speed Hacks

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193

HACK

Let Visual Studio Help

Visual Studio provides a nice shortcut to creating your own strongly typed

DataSet objects. Follow these simple steps:

1. Open your Visual Studio Project (or create a new one).

2. Select the project in the Solution Explorer and click the Show All Files

button.

3. Right-click on the project in the Solution Explorer, click Add, and select

Add New Item.

4. In the Add New Item dialog box, select the DataSet template. In the

Name field, type the name of your DataSet (e.g., Customers.xsd) and

click Open.

You will see that the XSD file was added to your project. There are two

things to note here. First, right-click on the XSD file and select Properties.

This is where you can specify a custom tool to generate your strongly typed

DataSet objects. By default, the custom tool is named

MSDataSetGenerator,

which is provided out of the box by Visual Studio (see Figure 6-8).

The other thing to know is that the class file for the strongly typed DataSet

object was autogenerated for you. You can see it by turning on Show All

Files and expanding the XSD file. Figure 6-9 shows that the Customers.cs

class file was autogenerated to create a DataSet object of type Customers.

Using the xsd.exe Tool

The .NET Framework SDK includes a tool named xsd.exe that can be used

for a few different reasons; one of the handiest is for creating strongly ...