Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio® 2010

Chapter 4. Analyzing Applications Using Architecture Explorer

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Exploring the Architecture Explorer

• Using the Architecture Explorer to understand existing code

• Visualizing existing code using dependency graphs

Every software developer has been in the following situation at some point and time. You have just started a new job with a new company, expecting to come in and write some brand new, fancy application. You are up to speed on some of the latest coding technologies, methodologies, and languages. You arrive for work ready to sit down and use everything you know to crank out some brand new code to help the company succeed.

And then it happens. There is a legacy system that was built several years ago that must be updated. And you are the lucky developer who has been assigned to make that update. Never mind that you have no idea or concept of how the application works, the inner workings of the calls between different objects, or how it interacts with other third-party add-ins.

Before Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, the only solution to this problem was to get your hands dirty in the code. You would have to open up the code files and start tracing (as best you could) how the logic flows between the different classes and components that make up the application. Maybe you would even try (as best you could) to diagram out the logic flow on a piece of scratch paper.

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate changes all that with the introduction of the Architecture Explorer tool. Using ...