SharePoint 2007 Creating Custom Forms for Custom Lists

I was recently wondering how I was going to create custom forms (EditForm.aspx, DispForm.aspx) for a custom list.

Now I want to deploy my custom list as a feature of course so I need to add these forms and the associated schema.xml file into my Visual Studio project.

But how was I to go about creating the form?

I though about using SharePoint Designer but a cold shiver ran down my spine.

Than a friend of mine pointed out this wonderful utility: OCDExportList
It is an extension to the stsadm command and is available as a WSP. It's deployed globally to your SharePoint site.
After that you can use the command

stsadm -o ocdexportlist -url http://mysiteurl -name listname -dir c:\temp

and it will generate in the c:\temp directory the schemal.xml file and assoicated forms for this list. Copy this across to the feature folder of the custom list and you should be good to start customizing.

That's a great time saver.