Improving Software Development Across the Lifecycle with Visual Studio 2010—Part 2

In this four part series my goal is to provide you a look at Visual Studio 2010 and highlight how you can use it to improve many aspects of your team-based software development—from planning to coding to testing. While this is not a comprehensive dive into everything Visual Studio 2010 can do, it does give you a glimpse into the power of Visual Studio 2010. Even though I take a team focus with this series, a lot of what I discuss can be used by individual developers as well.

In Part 2 I am focusing on the challenges of existing code and how you can better understand existing systems by creating visualizations of the code. From there I will focus on how you can use tools to discover emerging designs, and maintain architectural integrity as you implement new parts of the system.

<snip> This post can be viewed in its entirety at DougSeven.com. </snip>

Understanding existing code and controlling code complexity is critical. Once a software project’s complexity gets out-of-hand, it becomes fragile and difficult to maintain. Using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate enables you to quickly visualize existing code with DGML diagrams and Architecture Explorer, discover emerging designs and dependencies with the Layer Diagram, and maintain architectural integrity by incorporating the Layer Diagram validation into a gated check-in process.

In Part 3 I will look at how Visual Studio 2010 will help you eliminate bugs.

D7