Everyone's familiar with the oft-quoted phrase, “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words.” It is true and there's plenty of science to back that claim up. The most effective means to digest information is through data visualization. There's a lot of complex information to digest in a small amount of time.

What are the building blocks? What are the relationships among those building blocks? You can spend time spelunking through the Solution Explorer and you will have compiled data, but it's not likely that you will have much information. The DG gives you the ability to visualize the solution and specifically, the dependencies that make up the solution. This is where the Dependency Graph (DG) becomes your best friend.

There's work to be done and you're not quite sure where to start. Here's the scenario: You've been brought into a project to save the day! The previous developer has abruptly left the project and all you have is the source code. Figure 1 illustrates the QR Code for the link.įigure 1: The QR Code for the VS Code Visualization and Modeling Tools Forum. Microsoft has a nice support forum for Q&A on these tools and you can find that here. There are a number of UML related tools that I will cover in Part 2. Wouldn't it be nice if the build process could enforce that rule and if violated, fail the build? That's what the Layer Diagram provides and that's what I'll illustrate for you in this article. For example, you wouldn't want a UI-layer element taking on a dependency to a data-layer element. The layer diagram is a means of illustrating your solution's layers and to enforce rules about how assemblies take on certain dependencies. The dependency graph is a visual representation of the dependencies among the various assemblies that make up your solution. The two tools I'm going to illustrate in Part 1 (this article) are the dependency graph and the layer diagram. In this article, I'm going to illustrate a few of the things you can do to get started and get the most out of your Visual Studio investment. You happen to be one of those developers that either purchases Visual Studio Ultimate or works for an enterprise that had the foresight to give you Visual Studio Ultimate and although you can see the Architecture menu choice, you've never gone any farther than that.

Arch visual studio code