For a while now I've been developing an application to help out at work. Most professionals whatever there profession will have a notebook on their desk which gets filled up with task lists, meeting notes, and jotted down ideas. My problem is that as I review my notebook, its just packed with attempts to visualise either an object model (classes) or object graph (instances) so that I can explain an issue with a co-worker.
That's where CodeStruct started. I just wanted to be easily show things like
- This is a class and it's supposed to work in a UI, business object or data tier.
- That the system is composed of these different applications. Windows Clients, Web Sites, Web services and they hang together like this.
- This assembly is used in all these applications (which make up a system), but it actually contains classes which are only ever used in one of them.
As you can see it's a system visualisation tool that goes way beyond the current Class Designer that's built into Visual Studio 2005. Here's an example diagram showing the Assembly tree of the application and the initial Class designer functionality.
How did it get all that information? By reading the dll's of course. There's no point in having a diagramming tool that can't read in the existing information. There's already Visio for that.
The other thing is the layout. Its all automatic. Sizing, arrows, positioning; All automatic. I'm think I'll need to different strategies at different levels in the diagram, including one which allows manual control. Fortunately the diagramming engine was built with that in mind.
Tags
CodeStruct,
C#,
Diagramming Tool
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