Someone pointed out that the link I provided for the powertoys is no longer valid.  This is because we have moved all the shared projects from GotDotNet to CodePlex.

You will now be able to download the Class Designer Powertoys for VS 2008 from http://www.codeplex.com/modeling.

 Cheers,

Ramesh.

Come and join members from the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Architect, Developer and Tester editions and Team Foundation Server. There will be experts on hand to answer your questions, so we hope to see you there!

 Join the chat on Wednesday September 6th, 2006 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific time.

 To add this to your calendar, click here.

To see your local time of when this chat is, click here.

Cheers,

Ramesh.

There will be a public chat on June 15th between 8 and 9 a.m PST where team members from class designer as well as application designer, logical datacenter designer, and deployment designer will be available to answer any questions you may have on these designers.  Experts from the development, testing and program management team will also be on hand to answer questions in those areas.

When: Wednesday, June 15th, 2005 @ 8:00am - 9:00 am (PST)

Link to the chat room: http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats/#05_0615_DN_08

Looking forward to answering your questions.

Cheers,

Ramesh.

If you have created class diagrams using Visual Studio Beta 1, they will not open in Beta 2.  However, since the class diagram files persistence format is XML, Oleg from the Class Designer team has created a stylesheet to convert these diagrams to Beta 2.  Steps on how to do so is explained here (in the class designer team's blog).

Cheers,

Ramesh.

Part 3 of the interview with John is now available here.  In this one he talks about the various challeges building a V1 feature, what went into the decision making process and role of customers in guiding the design of the product and its future direction.

Ramesh.

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).

I really liked the intro text Josh had written to the video:

I've now done a few interviews with my co-workers building Visual Studio 2005.  I always like to ask "Aside from your own feature, What is your favorite new thing about Visual Studio 2005?"  The answer I consistently received was "the class Designer".  It will be available in versions of VS 2005 from Standard on up.

It is great to see the endorsements we get from our co-workers!

Ramesh.

In his blog, Modeling as a Productivity Enhancer in Visual Studio Team System, Barry raises excellent points regarding the areas where the Class Designer can really help developer productivity in the code generation scenarios.  I couldn't agree more.

However, class designer being a V1 product in Visual Studio, we had to make some hard choices on scenarios we want to focus on and successfully deliver them with high quality.

Firstly, we wanted to make sure that class diagrams created are made relevant throughout the development cycle - too often we have heard complaints from developers using UML tools that while the class diagrams they create are great to do initial design, they often go out of date once actual development begins.

Secondly, we wanted to make sure that creating and using class diagrams are easy and approachable to developers.  The diagrams should speak the language the developers are familiar with - the language they program in.

John Stallo, the Program Manager for Class Designer elaborates on these goals in his blog entry "A picture is worth a thousand words" (http://blogs.msdn.com/classdesigner/archive/2005/02/25/380023.aspx).

With the main focus on these two goals, we had to cut back on some of the cool productivity features you list above in terms of initial class design.  As you correctly point out, there are some types of edits that are better performed in the code editor and some that are intuitive to perform in the class designer.  We picked a few of them - interface implementation, overriding members, etc.  The Class Designer team will continue to blog highlighting more of these features in the upcoming weeks in its blog.

Integrating support for code snippets is probably one of the features we should have added support for but missed.  It was something we discussed but we didn't push hard enough to get it in.  The same goes for grouping members based on interface implementation, code regions (although this was cut because of some technical difficulties).

What other productivity features would you like more?  We have already gotten several suggestions from people like Daniel Moth, Tony Loton, and many others.  If you have the time please log bugs for your suggestions here:  http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/

This will enable us to collect data on what features customers request the most.

Cheers,
Ramesh Rajagopal.
Class Designer Team.