The first installment of this article will provide the functional overview of the utilities distributed with MS .NET SDK ver 1.1. The second part will cover third-party utilities and tools. I'll describe the following
- xsd.exe - Xml Schemas/DataTypes Support Utility
- sn.exe - Strong Name Utility
- gacutil.exe - Global Assembly Cache Utility
- regsvcs.exe - Services Installation Utility

Before the rest, you are encouraged to run all these tools from VS.NET Command Prompt window if you have on. If not - at least be sure to cd prompt path to SDKv1.1Bin directory.

xsd.exe - Microsoft's schema compiler. In some flavor, it's the revolutionary step in the direction of progam code integration with external XML data sources. It provides the ability to generate the .NET-compliat code from valid XSD schemas, thus mapping between a schema type and a programmatic type. Its primarily tweakness is arbuably may be considered as convergence between the different views to the data types from the schema's point and CLR's point.
xsd.exe, however, does not generates the serialization code similarly to IDL compiler. Such a serialization capabilities come from
Due to no one-way mappping between such an schema type constructs as any
regsvcs.exe - used to manually register an assembly containing serviced components.