Is the “xsd” command not supported in Visual Studio 2012 command window?

Question

I've read that it is possible to run xsd commands right in visual studio (2010). I have VS 2012 on my machine and when I run

xsd XMLFile.xml

I get

Command "xsd" is not valid.

So, is the "xsd" command not supposted in VS 2012 and is there any other way to execute "xsd" in VS 2012?

Answer 1

xsd.exe is available from the 'Developer Command Prompt for VS2012, not the command window that is part of the VS2012 IDE.

The 'Developer Command Prompt for VS2012' itself can be started from Start Menu -> All Programs -> Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 -> Visual Studio Tools -> Visual Studio Command Prompt For VS2012

Answer 2

Under Visual Studio 2012, there is a feature called Past Special which generate the class from an xml file.

See here: Paste XML or JSON as classes in Visual Studio.

Note that this feature requires at least .NET 4.5.

Answer 3

How to bring up the Visual Studio Command Prompt:

They say a picture is worth a thousand words (Works for Visual Studio 2017 - Community Edition / Windows 10):

1. Bring up the Visual Studio Command prompt.
2. Now run the XSD command against the relevant XML file.

It's as easy as that!