Introducing the Visual Studio Class Designer Team Blog

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Welcome to the Visual Studio Class Designer team blog. You’ve probably seen a few individual blogs created by Class Designer team members (Ramesh and Rakesh). This blog is a forum for you to communicate with team members about Class Designer.

The Visual Studio Class Designer is a fully-functional, visual design environment for the Common Language Runtime. The Visual Studio Class Designer lets you visualize the structure of classes and other types, and through these visual representations edit their source code. Changes made to the class diagram are immediately reflected in code, and changes made to the code immediately affect the appearance of the designer. This synchronous relationship between designer and code makes it easy to create and configure complex CLR types visually. For further information, please go to the MSDN article.

Since this is a team blog, we will have developers, testers and the program manager write topics on a weekly basis. Here is the tentative list of topics we will be covering in the coming weeks. Our goal is to publish the topic every Thursday (starting on 2/24/2005). Please check back each week for new updates.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Visualizing class and member details in the property grid and viewing details from tooltips

Visualizing inheritance hierarchies

Setting up and viewing relationships between classes

Refactoring with the Class Designer

Editing type members using the Class Detail Window

Using the Class Designer to override methods

Customizing the layout of your class diagram

Class Designer integration with the source code control system

Using Class Designer to document your code –Exporting diagrams as images

Orphan shapes in the Class Designer

Consuming generics in the Class Designer

Class Designer file format

Each topic will provide in depth information about a selected feature. Topics will be presented by various team members. Over time, we will add new topics to the list and provide new information on existing topics to keep the content fresh and relevant. If you have suggestions for topics that you would like us to cover, please let us know.

Since we’re building a V1 release, we would really like your feedback on using the Class Designer. Our interaction with you through this blog will help us design a better product.

Well, that’s it for this week. You can also visit the Class Designer general discussion for other details.

Regards,

Patrick Tseng

Software Development Engineer

Visual Studio Class Designer Team

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 09, 2005
    Is this to be a C# only feature like the refactoring tool?

    Thanks,
    Chris
  • Anonymous
    February 09, 2005
    This blog is still under construction and it's not completed yet. I am still working on the topic and finalize the text before I published it.

    CD will work with C#, VB, J# and C++ (and MC++). Wrt to refactoring feature, CD will be using language specific refactoring feature when it's avaiable.
  • Anonymous
    February 14, 2005
    I've spent an hour or two looking over a few things in team system, and to be honest from a designers piont of view i think its pretty disappointing. (although I should look further but am not particullary inspired to)

    You've managed to include class diagrams. this is the only real mention of uml at all.

    How on earth is just adding a class diagram tool going to help to realise business logic?

    Why no itteration through the Unified Process.

    Yet again MS developers will be re-coding and re-coding and re-coding as requirements are misunderstood and an application is badly written

    (By badly written I mean an application that does not fulfill a business requirement)
  • Anonymous
    February 25, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2005
    Wrt Chris McKenzie's question, the ClassDesigner will supports C#, VB and J#.
  • Anonymous
    June 01, 2008
    Welcome to the Visual Studio Class Designer team blog. You’ve probably seen a few individual blogs created by Class Designer team members ( Ramesh and Rakesh ). This blog is a forum for you to communicate with team members about Class Designer. The Visua
  • Anonymous
    June 04, 2008
    Welcome to the Visual Studio Class Designer team blog. You’ve probably seen a few individual blogs created by Class Designer team members ( Ramesh and Rakesh ). This blog is a forum for you to communicate with team members about Class Designer. The Visua
  • Anonymous
    June 15, 2009
    PingBack from http://debtsolutionsnow.info/story.php?id=2249