A Quick Tour of the XSD Migration Kit

By Stephan Meyn

Thursday, October 23, 2003
I have built a set of tables for a simple Issue Tracking solution in MS-Access. The following explains the steps to migrate to a prevalence solution:
  1. In Visual Studio.NET set up a project with two applications (a Winforms app called Loader and a DLL called IssueTracker)
  2. In the Loader application project open the main form and bring up the server explorer
  3. In the server explorer connect to the ACCESS database
  4. drag and drop the tables of the database you want to convert onto the loader app mainform
  5. This step creates a db connection and a set of DataAdapters
  6. select any of the data adapters and click 'generate dataset'
  7. in the subsequent dialog select all the dataadapters
  8. Click ok and remember the type name of the data set
  9. Now start the Migration Kit application (called Bamboo Builder)
  10. Enter the following info
    • Check InheritFrom MarshalByRefObject
    • Namespace Name: the namespace you choose for the generated classes
    • Root Name: The name of the class that will controll access to all instances. this is the root class
    • Target Directory: where you want to have the generated classes saved
    • Loader Dataset ClassName: when you generated Dataset in step 8 above you gave it a name.
    • LoaderNameSpace: the namespace the loader uses. This and the previous are used to generate the fully qualified name for the loader class to access the strong data types that the compiled XSD provides. BambooBuilder requires the fully qualified typename(as in Namespace of the loader and the dataset type name) to build the loader correctly.
  11. Select File Save to save this definition
  12. Select generate

Once you have done this you will get a set of class files:

And there you have it. You can now augment the class files as you see fit, link the root and table objects into a dll and complete the loader application to transfer your application.