Tag Archives: C#

Generate Serialization Classes As Part of Your Build (Part 2)

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A while ago, I posted about integrating the xsd.exe tool into the build process within Visual Studio or MSBuild. This time around, we’ll look at generating the code for the XML Serialization object model and making a few tweaks as part of the process. Here I will specifically look at retrieving the comments in the xsd:documentation elements and applying them to code elements as XML comments. We’ll break this down into four key steps along with some closing comments and source code.

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DBML Fixup Preview

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Back in February I blogged about DBML Fixup—a tool whose goal was to sync LINQ to SQL models with their respective database schemas from within the Visual Studio environment, as well as to handle running various fixup tasks on models. Now it’s six months later, and I have a much clearer vision of what the tool is meant to be as well as a firmer command on VSX. The following screencast is a preview of the features of DBML Fixup.

 

 

Here are some previous posts which (briefly) describe the domain:

http://blogs.rev-net.com/ddewinter/2008/02/16/the-linq-to-sql-model/

http://blogs.rev-net.com/ddewinter/2008/02/16/linq-to-sql-and-database-schema-sync/

 

Any ideas about directions for the tool? Or maybe something that wasn’t covered in the screencast? I’d love to hear your ideas.

Generate Serialization Classes As Part of Your Build (Part 1)

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Yes, I am back from the grave. The past two months have been infuriatingly busy for me (and you’ll see why in a later post), but I finally have some time to write again. The topic? Generating serialization classes as part of your build process (Part 1) and in your own way (Part 2).

I might reach only a niche of .NET developers with this post, but it’s something that niche should be aware of. There is a tool in the .NET framework called xsd.exe, and one of its functions is to generate code, specifically .NET classes, from an XML Schema file (XSD). The tool decorates these classes with XML serialization attributes such that when .NET serializes an instance of the generated class that represents the root element, the output conforms to that XML schema. Often, developers using XML schemas will need to change them throughout the course of a project. Leveraging xsd.exe in a project thus requires the generated classes to be updated when an XML schema is updated. This is a bit dangerous in larger projects because not all developers may realize that the tool must be re-run, especially in the case of extremely minor changes to the schema.

Wouldn’t it be better to have a tighter integration among the XML schema, the generated classes, and the build environment? Fortunately, we can achieve this with a few simple steps, thanks to the MSBuild system for projects inside Visual Studio.

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