Code Canvas

re: Code Canvas

Drew Marsh — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 04:30:34 GMT

I see this as a truly revolutionary step to the way we could be working with code. Especially once touch kicks in this could be an amazing way to navigate your solution and work on your code.

Can you actually start to edit the files once you drill down to that level? I don't mean is it technically possible, because of course it is, I mean... have you reached that point in the implementation yet?

Awesome work though. Here's to hoping we see it in the next version of Visual Studio. :)

Later,

Drew

re: Code Canvas

Drew Marsh — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 04:35:50 GMT

Duh, apparently I musta lost focus during the part where you actually show the editor working, but I just watched the video again and caught it. AWESOME stuff.

re: Code Canvas

Marcos Caceres — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 15:29:56 GMT

Wow, that's seems pretty useful. I can't think of the number of times I've done something similar on paper to work out all my class hierarchies. However, I wonder at what level you would get too many classes (i.e., the program gets too big) for this to start breaking down. The thing that sucks is that computer screens are just too small compared to, say, a white board... so once things go off screen it becomes a matter of out of sight out of mind :( I wonder if there is some way to visually group things at a custom level of abstraction to overcome that... anyway... got me thinking, so thanks! :)

re: Code Canvas

Justin Bailey — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 08:44:39 GMT

That is really impressive! Will we ever get to see a download? I'd love to throw this at my own code.

Please, please get on Channel 9 with Charles and talk about this stuff! http://channel9.msdn.com

re: Code Canvas

Justin Tabb — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 05:49:41 GMT

This is an awesome development, can't wait to use it!

re: Code Canvas

El Bruno — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:23:39 GMT

You also got a Spanish review (http://elbruno.com/blogs/elbruno/archive/2009/03/27/future-code-canvas-peinate-que-viene-gente.aspx) of course an excelent one !!!

great work

re: Code Canvas

rhm — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 15:12:05 GMT

Why the file layer? Files are a legacy container for source code. I can see why commercial programming environments are still attached to them, but for a research project, they don't add anything but additional clutter.

For that matter, assemblys are a deployment artifact. Does the person trying to understand how code is structured in a project really care that much about which assembly a class is in? At some point they do, so you might want to turn that view on, but most of the time you'd want to arrange the classes by either inheritence relationship or by some coupling metric.

re: Code Canvas

kaelr — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 20:44:30 GMT

The file layer is mainly there to make the transition from file-based code editors to an infinite canvas more understandable to a wider audience. I agree that things get much more interesting and useful when you are no longer constrained by the files that store the code on disk.

Assemblies aren't the only way of grouping and clustering things together on the canvas, but it was the only one shown in the video since that happened to be the way the Visual Studio dependency graph was drawn in Architecture Explorer.

re: Code Canvas

Walid — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 06:48:48 GMT

Great work! Assuming you're in the listening-2-feedback mood, few desired additional features may include user-customized views of the code graph including possibly execution path(s), either automatically sniffed out or user-assisted with extra layer(s) of meta-data that may be saved and used later by same or other users. This can be further enhanced by scripted code walk-throughs (something from my past albeit strictly manual) for other users/groups, multi-layered for presentations to various audience groups. Thanks for the good work and hope we get a chance to actually use this soon.

re: Code Canvas

Rachel Blum — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 04:09:59 GMT

That's an excellent first step towards a better development environment. It's sad you went through patent process, but I guess MS Research doesn't run on love alone ;)

What I'm really interested in is how well this holds up for larger projects - I would imagine there's quite a bit of Visual Clutter (tm;)?

The other question is - can I abandon the file view and rearrange individual classes, without being constrained by the container?

“Code canvas” / Deep Zoom for code

Pierrick's Blog — Sun, 10 May 2009 15:18:16 GMT

Microsoft Research nous présente leur travaux sur l’interface homme machine dans le domaine de la programmation.

This is amazing

Jimmy — Tue, 12 May 2009 16:35:42 GMT

This is amazing.

When will we be able to download and test it ?

Can't wait to try it !

re: Code Canvas

jonh — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:22:25 GMT

awesome. I too can't wait to try it

re: Code Canvas

Raymond — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 04:32:16 GMT

This looks great!

Very good job. I can definitely see where it will be of great benefit to developers