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
