Well, folks, today I am bit free from the regular bug fixing work that we do at FLOvate. I needed to do some thing creative work, so started to explore VS 2005 features.

Getting Started

Class Diagrams is a new feature in VS 2005. It seem to be very intuitive to use at the first glance. I started off by creating an interface called IDog, which had few methods declared such as - Feed, Unleash, Walk etc. that need to be implemented in the class which derives from this interface. You can see my effort in the above picture.

Goal of the class diagram is to enable developers to easily document the design of the application and keep it in sync with the code. And it succeeds by using features like refactoring.

I can see that chaps and chappesses from Microsoft VS 2005 team have been successful at covering all features that is generally needed to create such class diagrams by developers.

In case you’re documenting a general-purpose API that is meant for external users, you can filter out the members visible on the diagram to those of public and protected visibility and hide all private/internal details of implementation!

Finally, you can make great use of comment shapes to annotate your diagram to explain design decisions and to clarify the purpose of different elements.

Exporting Diagram as Images

When the diagram(s) are ready for export, just right-click empty design surface area of the diagram and choose menu item “Export Diagram as Image…”. You can export the image to some of the most common image types like png, bmp, gif, jpg, tif etc.

A very nice feature that I will be using in all my future pet projects while coding in VS 2005.