A long time ago I used to read the CodeGuru web site for information about software development. I have since graduated to other more interesting web site. However I still go back to CodeGuru every now any then. Today I saw an article posted there entitled “Inferring an XML Schema from an XML Document” by Paul Kimmel. I read it with interest as I am becoming more aware of XML Schema.Paul said that writing plain XML documents is easy. However he does not have enough practice to write XML Schema documents from scratch. The attribute and namespace syntax gets him mixed up sometimes. So he decided to write a program to generate an XML Schema from any given XML document. That sounds like a good idea to me.
The trick is to employ the XmlSchemaInterface class from the .NET framework. Specifically you can use the InferSchema method of this class to produce an XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) schema if you pass it an XML file. That way you can let the class do the formatting and syntax for you. Sure you could do this yourself by hand if you know the ins and outs of XML Schema. But why take the hard route?
I suspect Paul wrote this article to help publicize his new book “LINQ Unleashed: for C#”. The list price for this book is $49.99. However you can get it for $31.49 from Amazon with free shipping. Good luck Paul with your new title. I have some interest in LINQ myself. If I can get my company to pay for it, I will pick up a copy.
