Visual C++ Team Blog

Class Designer for C++ in VS2008

This will sound like a rant but it isn't, after all it has been 10 years of neglect on your primary platform, and *primary cause* for migration to other tools and OSes.

First of all, I would presume you guys need to work fast on catching up with Eclipse extensibility models.

Second is that VCCodeModel or whatever it is nowhere near well documented and bug free.

The ability to create any diagram or anything else for that matter is dependant on the above.

And while finally looking to address C++ community, why not expose the tools for db work, open up the compiler front-end and plenty more.

The root of all the problems is in the front-end data model, and quality of it, how you expose it (or lack of), I wouldn't care less if bloated CLR libraries generate my diagrams or vice verse, but I will care if cannot generate what I need or be able to switch tools.

Being on the cutting-edge team (lets not go onto .NET hopefuls), you guys know better than anyone that C++ and tools for it are evolving rapidly; most importantly, without hacks that will be punished on new architectures.

And you also know that to be up-to-date with competition would be quite a challenge if you just had to do everything yourself, in standards, tooling, and an open perspective.

all while resources are leaking into all the MSIL handicaps.

Dear all,

Thank you for taking the survey, we got precious ideas from you!

The survey will be closed by the end of this week, but you can still share

with us your thought about Class Designer.

Our site accepts suggestion and bug submission all year round:

https://connect.microsoft.com/feedback/CreateFeedback.aspx?SiteID=450

Thanks again for your help!

Class Designer Team

This is non-intuitive since you're discussing modeling tools, but it is very important for coders (who lives in Unix world and want to move to Microsoft world).  Please add feature in C++ ( or any DotNet languages ) to allow annotations within the code specific to the modeling tool.  Mouse clicking in a modeling tool is very tiresome and non-productive for coders, even if it is the best modeling tool it the world (I've used CASE tools like IEF).

Then, allow the modeling tool to scan the source code for those annotations to quickly build a graphical representation of the BUSINESS logic (not the c++ syntax like Doxygen tool on unix).

Think of PerlDoc as a precursor to the in-line documentation/notation for your Modeling annotation syntax in C++ source code.

This will eliminate the 'writer block' that a coder would face when using a modeling tool for the first time.  i.e. why sit for an hour with a mouse, when one could start coding already. :)

Round-trip engineering is severly handicapped.  Having annotations specific to the modeling tool would eliminate this discrepancy. :)  

All I want is for VC++ to have

Code -> Diagram, and

Diagram -> Code

"Real time" C# like would be nice, but I'll take roundtrip for design and later documentation.

I am pretty sure we were promised that for next release when it was cut from 2005 studio 2 years ago.

Dear all, Class Designer is a tool in Visual Studio which enables visualization of class structures, class building and refactoring. It uses a diagramming notation that is loosely based on the UML Class Diagram standard, but presents specific languag