Whidbey Beta 1 to Beta 2 Migration with Typed Datasets

Today we are migrating my project from Whidbey Beta1 to Beta 2 (if you know why this is happening today, go ahead and laugh with us), and our biggest hurdle so far is Typed Datasets.

We used dozens of XSD schemas to create typed datasets. Of course, Beta 2 no longer gives a menu option for creating a typed dataset directly from a schema (see this post in the Fedback Center for Visual Studio). The prospect of converting to the Dataset type of schema was daunting, and moving to the command line for xsd.exe was not going over so well either.

We did discover, however, that you can still generate the dataset using the IDE. In the properties of the XSD file, you can set the custom tool to MSDataSetGenerator. Then you can right-click the XSD file and choose Run Custom Tool. The IDE generates the code for the dataset. Whew!