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.

Version 1.0.16 of Type Visualiser

A new version of Type Visualiser is available. See the Type Visualiser page for download details.

I've added a new mulit-document interface using tabs to allow many diagrams to be open at once.  I found this is need when using the tool for any serious discovery of unfamilar code.

Unlike the standard WPF tab control I have written my own to ensure individual tabs are kept in memory for fast switching between tabs.  This will consume memory the more tabs you open, but waiting between tab switch didn't feel like a good user experience.  As types are loaded they are also stored in a global cache to prevent analysing the same type twice even for different diagrams.  

I'm currently looking at changing the way I've implemented zooming, panning and centreing to a far better approach. This will allow for animations when zooming and for infinite canvas size that expands when diagrams push the boundaries of the diagram.

Enjoy.

Type Visualiser version 1.08

Type Visualiser version 1.08

New features and changes:

• Thickness of the dependency line indicates how dependent the subject is on the dependency.
• Added 64 bit and 32 bit release mode executables.
• Allowed combined hide filters (ie combine hide-trivials with hide system types).
• Added support for saving diagrams and reloading them.
• Properly name generic types rather than simply List now will be List.
• Choose type dialog will now remember the last assembly opened.
• Added icons and count for trivial and non-trivial dependencies on the subject.