Class Designer Feature in Whidbey

Hello. My name is Ramesh Rajagopal. I am part of the team that is building the Class Designer - a very cool tool in Whidbey.

The class designer tool lets you create Class Diagrams for the static structures in your Visual Studio projects and assemblies. It uses a UML-like notation.

One of the goals of the Class Designer tool is to provide added value to the customers by making its visuals, terminology and behavior closely resemble the code that it visualizes. We believe that the UML concepts of “attributes“ and “operations“ don't directly map to the CLR concepts that the developer deals with. So instead of seeing “Attributes“ and “Operations“ compartments in a say, C# or VB class, you'll see “Fields“, “Methods“, “Properties“ and “Events“ compartments.

You can use this tool to:

  • Visualize your existing code (be it in source or in an assembly).
  • Build classes, interfaces, etc.
  • Update and maintain your code including support for refactoring.

The tool should be thought of as an "alternate view of your code". Any edits you make either to the diagram or to the code are continuously synced so that the changes made in one are immediately reflected in the other.

This feature will be available in C#, C++, J# and VB.

More on this feature soon. I also want to add an image of a Class Diagram as soon as I figure out how to add an image to a blog (as you can tell, I am a newbie).

Cheers,

Ramesh.