DGML, Containers, and VSTS 2010 Architecture Rendering

re: DGML, Containers, and VSTS 2010 Architecture Rendering

CameronS - MSFT — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 23:55:16 GMT

Nothing I can point you at yet. There will be more, and I also plan on blogging more on it, but none yet. 'Cause you're right, it's just the tip of the iceberg at this point. :)

re: DGML, Containers, and VSTS 2010 Architecture Rendering

Kevin Mitchell — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:15:13 GMT

Judging by the example of a conditional style, and your mention of supporting alternative layout managers, there seems to be a lot more to your DGML support than I originally thought. Is there a document describing all these capabilities somewhere? Your blog entries give a good initial taster, but it looks like they are just the tip of an iceberg.

re: DGML, Containers, and VSTS 2010 Architecture Rendering

CameronS - MSFT — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:49:47 GMT

Thanks for these excellent suggestions. The expanded group label problem might be solved by creating a conditional style that does this:

</Style>

There appears to be a bug in Beta1 that stops this from working. We are investigating whether this can be fixed. Of course, it is not clear you always want to do this, because when you have a very large graph and you zoom out a long way there is a semantic zoom effect where the expanded group labels scale up to fill the box and the nodes inside disappear.

Constraint based layout is definitely on our radar for a future release. You have also identified a type of graph (cyclic) that doesn’t work so well in the tree layout algorithm which tries to find natural layers in your graph. A cyclic graph obvious doesn’t have natural layers. This is one reason why we also provide a force directed layout which tends to work better with cyclic graphs.

re: DGML, Containers, and VSTS 2010 Architecture Rendering

Kevin Mitchell — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:22:47 GMT

Hi Cameron,

Thanks for an interesting post. I've been using DGML a bit, but not for the purpose you originally intended. It works quite well for some things, but I've encountered a few limitations that might be worth addressing if you wanted to widen its scope a bit.

For example, whilst it makes sense to display the container name when it is collapsed, it would be useful to optionally suppress this name when the container is expanded, as the name can sometimes be "deduced" from the display of the contents. Is there a way of doing this at present?

A trickier situation is where you'd like an ordering between the siblings of a parent. So I'd like to be able to add edges from a parent to a collection of children, and then use the order in which I added the edges to control the relative positions of the children when displayed, e.g. top-down or left-right. Alternatively I suppose the sibling orders could be defined by additional invisible edges from child-to-child, at the risk of making the DGML file even more verbose. Obviously you don't want to impose an ordering by default, as this would constrain the layout too much. But having an optional way of specifying an ordering, and having the layout respect it, would be really useful.

Suppose you wanted to use DGML to describe a flow-chart, and this chart was cyclic. A good example might be a simple loop. In this case you'd traditional think of there being a main flow and a back edge. So if the graph was being drawn from top-to-bottom you'd have the main flow centered on the main axis, and then the back edge off to the side. However, as DGML has no concept of "main flow" and "back edge" the graph ends up being displayed symmetrically, with the main flow off-center on one side, and the back-edge off-center on the other side. This looks rather unintuitive, so some mechanism for describing and displaying such cases would be really useful.

re: DGML, Containers, and VSTS 2010 Architecture Rendering

Sandeep Aparajit — Tue, 12 May 2009 14:34:05 GMT

This is cool. VS 2010 Rocks!

I just went through the featureset, VS 2010 is going to deliver and I was astonished to see that. Thanks for making the tool so powerful.

Sandeep

VSTS Links - 02/25/2009

Team System News — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:28:32 GMT

Cameron Skinner on DGML, Containers, and VSTS 2010 Architecture Rendering Steve St. Jean on Introduction

Anith » DGML, Containers, and VSTS 2010 Architecture Rendering

Anith » DGML, Containers, and VSTS 2010 Architecture Rendering — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 06:35:57 GMT

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