This is the second post of Architectural Feature in VS2010 series.In this post, I’ll talk about the the new Architecture Explorer Windows in Visual Studio 2010.
Since the first release of Visual Studio, Solution Explorer enables us to browse the entire contents or files of our solution such as aspx, aspx.cs, jpg, and so on. Nonetheless, Solution Explorer only offer the “plain” view of your files, just to show everything in your solution.
In VS2010, a brand new explorer window namely Architecture Explorer provides an easy way to drill down into your code and analyze relationships between projects, types, their assemblies and references.
Without further due, let’s try to get our hand dirty with this architecture explorer. In this example, I’ll use BlogEngine.NET as the example. For your information, BlogEngine.NET is an open source blog engine that was built on top of .NET. I assume you have download and successfully opened it with your VS2010.
When you are ready, you can enable the Architecture Explorer via View Menu – Architecture Explorer as shown on below.
Immediately, the Architecture Explorer will be shown up
A few options that we should notice:
- Class View enables us to see our components in the entire solution in the structured way starting from namespace, class, till the member such as properties and methods
- Solution View shows us the entire files in our solution in the file-listed view.
- “File System – Select Files” enables us to analyzing the assembly outside of solution.
As you can see from the example, I tried to open up a FCKEditor assembly and drilled down in more detail view.
Note that when drilling down each items, you are facilitated with search textbox which enable you to easily select your preference items as shown on below.
Alternately, you could also specify what categories and properties will be shown.
Beside from drilling down our solution, it’s also possible for us to create a graph based on the item that we selected.
Try to select one or more item on each view. Subsequently, click on the “create graph” button to generate the graph.
What differ this graph from dependency graph? While dependency graph displays all the entire member of your application, this custom graph allow us to select on particular item to be shown. It therefore allows us to pay attention on the item we want to focus on.
Even though the graph is created, you could still append the member to the graph at anytime needed. To do this, just simply select and drag the item to the graph.
Having completed creating your diagram, you could save it as xps file or copy it to memory buffer, so that we could paste it anywhere such as word or powerpoint document.
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