The March CTP of Visual Studio 2007 will have support for C++ projects in Class Designer. This will be limited only to visualizing your existing code from native C++ projects. Editing code from Class Diagrams and Managed C++ projects will not be supported...

In the past few months, we have covered Class Designer features in the upcoming Visual Studio 2005 release. After reading these articles, you have probably noticed that the serialization format for the diagram file (.cd file extension) is in plain XML...

For more information about this CTP and see if you really want to install it, see this post in Rob Caron's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/robcaron/archive/2005/06/15/429278.aspx I'll add that this build should have the option to show method signatures on...

I will be attending this year's Microsoft TechEd in Orlando Florida from 6/6~6/10. There's a HandsOnLab (HOL007 in ARC07 track) for the Class Designer beta2 bits which you can try it out. I will also be spending 25 hrs in the ARC cabana booth. That's...

You’ve probably know why we will not have blog articles for the next few weeks. The team is currently busy working on fixing bugs. We will resume our weekly blogs articles in a few weeks. In the meantime, please let us know specifically: 1. What topics...

We’ve published a set of set of add-ins which augments existing functionality in the Visual Studio 2005 Class Designer and the Distributed Systems Designers. The Design Tools Enhancements add-in provides a common set of features that can be used by both...

One of the biggest value propositions of the Class Designer is to keep class diagrams always in-sync with code – in fact it is supposed to be another view of your code. Code is the ‘model’ behind class diagrams. If you open a class diagram file in an...

One of the design goals of Class Designer was to enable developers to easily document the design of applications and keep it in sync with the code. Class diagrams residing in Visual Studio projects solve this purpose very well, however more traditional...

Class Designer Integration with Source-Code Control Class Designer is built for use with solutions checked into source-code control systems. For those of you using Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), this will mean you are plugged into Team Foundation...

By now you hopefully have the beta 2 version of Class Designer. If not, maybe this beta 2 feature will convince you to get it. One of the new features in Class Designer beta 2 is Auto Layout. In the olden days (pre beta 2), the default layout you got...

We have created a stylesheet which can convert class diagram files (.cd) from Beta 1 to Beta 2 format. It should work in most cases. Feel free to modify it to fit your needs. Here are the steps you need to take to convert class diagram file(s) from...

How do I do that? Whether you program in C# or VB, you’ll notice that when you type “overrides” or “Overrides” in code editor, you get an intellisense list of members that you can override. This feature has also been exposed in Class Designer: In the...

Overloaded members are treated specially in ClassDesigner: they’re grouped together when listed in the shape, and there’re few limitations when you want to create overloaded members. Today we will talk about the various ways and limitations to create...

If you’ve used the beta version of the Class Designer, you’ve probably noticed the Class Details Window (if for no other reason than it pops up by default when you open the designer for the first time). If you haven’t tried Class Designer yet, here’s...

Josh Ledgard, PM in Visual Studio recently interviewed John (PM for Class Designer). The video for the first part of the interview can be viewed here (Channel 9). It is cool to see that he learnt about Class Designer from the team blog and decided to...

The language teams added several refactoring features to the editor in the Whidbey release of visual studio. We attempted, as best we could, to expose these refactoring features through the class designer in ways users would expect them in a modeling...

Class Designer will be availabe on all Visual Studio Editions Standard and above. There seems to be some confusion that Class Designer will only be available in Team Architect and Team Dev SKUs, so we wanted to make it clear that it is not the case. However...

Oops! This is the fault on my part. The person who is scheduled to write the article is out of the office this week. Therefore, there is no posting for this week. Please come back to our site next week. Thanks! Patrick Tseng Visual Studio Class Designer...

When I’m learning about a new program or teaching someone else about an existing one, I find it helpful to begin by identifying the key classes and seeing how they relate to each other. There are many different ways that classes can be related. Three...

I believe one of the strongest things going for class diagrams is being able to holistically look at a collection of types and see how they’re related . In other words, it’s not just about getting shapes on a diagram but about the lines that connect them...

Hello J ! My name is Yu Xiao. I am a Software Design Engineer/Test working on Visual Studio Class Designer team. This time I am going to demonstrate how to visualize inheritance hierarchies using Class Designer. When I was reading existing code, even...

The Visual Studio Class Designer team is sad to announce that the Class Designer will not support the C++ language in the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2005. Late last week we were forced to make a very difficult decision, which we are relaying to...

Hi! I’m Eugene Chigirinskiy , a Software Design Engineer working on Visual Studio Class Designer. In this blog entry I will give an overview of how the details of various diagram elements (classes, members, inheritance lines, etc) are visualized in the...

G’day! I’m John Stallo, a Program Manager working on the Visual Studio Class Designer. In this blog entry I’d like to give an overview of what our goals for Class Designer in this release are, and perhaps more if not equally important, invite folks in...

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. ...