I have Visual Studio Ultimate 2012 and now I was looking for the “Past Special -> Paste XML as Classes” feature allowing me to copy a XML and paste it as a serializable type.

However, even though I found several link talking about that feature (ex. here it says also of the other feature Past Special ->Paste JSON as Classes), I cannot see that item in the EDIT menù!! After the voice “Cycled Clipboard Ring” there is the “Delete” one and “Past Special” is missing. I was wondering if I need to enable something or to be in a project of a particular type (I was in a project with target Windows Phone 7.1).

In the past I used a similar feature as an Add-in coming from the WCF REST Starter Kit but even following again the instructions I followed for the past VS version (http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/wcf/thread/cc5843cb-9283-4789-9043-365e5a8d4beb) I cannot succede to make appear the menu voice “Paste Xml As Type” (that was the name) in VS2012.

The trick, or better work around, is to use a project targeted Windows Phone 8 and then copy the generated file in your Windows Phone 7.1 project. In fact, at least for the time being, for a possible bug of VS2012, the “Past Special” feature is missing if the project target is Windows Phone 7.1 but it is available it is Windows Phone 8!!

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12/4/2013 Note: this bug will not be fixed