We are all aware of XSD tool that comes along the Visual Studio 2005. We all might have used it to generate classes and dlls using this tool from xsd schemas. In order to use schemas that import other schemas using xs:import , we need to specify both the base schema and the imported schema on the command line.As the XSD tool doesn't seem to understand schemaLocation attribute . Just mentioning the import tag won't import the schema while creating classes. So the correct usage of xsd.exe would be xsd.exe ImportingSchema.xsd ImportedSchema.xsd {options}