Friday, August 24, 2012

New Version of Type Visualiser

Version 1.0.18 has been released of my Type Visualiser Tool.  This release contains some cool new features  but the biggest change was by far shifting to a more strict MVVM approach.

When writing the first release the agile-ist in me wanted to get a prototype up and running as quickly as possible.  This resulted in a great deal of code behind to dynamically draw the visualisation.  The driver behind the change was the increasing number of bugs, inconsistency of behaviour and ultimately difficultly of adding new features.

By changing to a strict MVVM approach and heavily leveraging data-binding most of the code behind shifted into controllers and the model.  Once complete the justification was evident by the ease of adding new some new features.

Here's a summary of the new features:

  • All diagrams will visualise all parent types back to but not including System.Object.
    This includes interfaces and inherited interfaces.
  • Secondary associations can be shown by toggling the show/hide option from the Hide menu.  This will show associations between all other types on the diagram. By default only relationships back to the main subject of the diagram are shown.  It can get a little busy which is the reason why secondary associations are hidden by default.
  • Navigating to another type will now display the selected type in a new tab rather than changing the current diagram.  This allows much more information to be visualised more easily.

  • The canvas that the diagram sits on can be expanded to better accommodate dragging elements around. By mouse dragging a type and pushing the edge of the diagram canvas the canvas will expand.

1 comment:

  1. I've just noticed a small issue where the pop-up context menu "Add-To-Trivial-List" isn't adding the selected type. I'll get to fixing this shortly.

    Also, one omission from the post is that consume associations are not shown for secondary associations yet. That's coming soon.

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