Experiences with LINQ2xsd ?

Question

I am looking for more advanced alternatives to xsd.exe.

I am just about to start a fairly simple project and decided to try using LINQ2XSD. The project has now been released as open source to CodePlex.

I'm just wondering how many people have attempted to use it, if there are any 'dealbreakers' or critical bugs in there.

I downloaded the project from CodePlex, compiled it and managed to successfully create some classes. The two slightly annoying things that strike me off the bat are :

Archaic class names with 'LocalType' at the end:

  new MyFile.MyOrdersLocalType.MyOrderLocalType.BillingDetailsLocalType();

Needing to specify the type of every attribute in the XSD to avoid the error :

  Xml type 'xdt:anyAtomicType' does not support Clr type 'String'.

I get this even though the attribute was generated in C# as a string object. It just can't put it into the XML document as it is defined as 'xsd:anyAtomicType'.

Those two points are moot though compared to any overall feedback people might have. It seems like there are very few visitors to that CodePlex site which is a shame as it seems to me to be much more useful than LINQ2XML for the projects I'm working on.

See also: Is LINQ2XSD Dead?

Answer 1

I've tried it and have had excellent results against the NHibernate and Linq To SQL xsd schemas to create statically typed mapping files, and to manipulate them programmatically. This was using the 0.2 alpha release, and it all seemed to work fine. I did rename some of the generated classes.