Experience a designer like Visual Studio 2005

The Visual Studio Class Designer is a versatile, visual design environment for the common language runtime. You can use the Visual Studio Class Designer to visualize classes and other types of structures, and to edit their source code by visualizing the presentation method. Changes to the class diagram are reflected directly in your code, and changes to the code directly affect the appearance of the designer. The synchronization relationship between designers and code makes it easy to create and configure complex CLR types.

Class Designer contains specially designed features that will help you refactor code, easily rename identifiers, and Overload methods. You can automatically generate classes and structs, and you can implement interfaces by automatically generating stubs.

Finally, Class Designer can also be used as a communication tool, and you can use it to share code base areas with coworkers. Class diagrams can be printed as hard copies or saved as images for display in an HTML page or PowerPoint presentation.

Figure 1. Class Designer

Why use the Visual Class Designer?

Software design is a difficult and complex task. Challenges at any time in the development cycle, from the early stages of design, to the code review phase, and to the document-finishing phase of the final product. The Visual Class Designer is useful throughout the development cycle, for example in the following situations:

1 Understanding existing code: The existing code base can be complex and confusing. Using the Visual Class Designer, you can graphically browse existing class structures and master the relationships between classes.

2 class Design: The Visual Class Designer allows you to design and implement software graphically from a higher level.

3 Review and Refactor code: Visual Class Designer is a powerful tool for code review and refactoring. You can add annotations to an existing code diagram for review and use the design to refactor the code, which saves time.

4 Document class Diagram: Class diagrams can be used to record the hierarchy of existing classes, which graphically displays the inheritance tree. Class diagrams are also useful for exchanging ideas with colleagues through e-mail or a visual presentation.

Visual Studio Class Designer

The Visual Studio Class Designer is a visual code design tool that has integrated design effects for the. NET Framework. The visual effects of Class Designer are closely related to the common language runtime. CLR graphics, such as classes, structs, and interfaces, are represented by a visual unique graphic that is used to identify them. Also, the terms in the diagram are for a specific language, for example, in Visual Basic, you can use public, private, and Friend access levels, whereas in C # they will appear as public, private, and internal. Tightly integrated with the CLR, Class designer has become the ideal tool for using the. NET Framework design classes.