Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2012

Chapter 15

Analyzing Applications Using Architecture Explorer and Dependency Graphs

What's In This Chapter?

• Exploring the Architecture Explorer
• Using the Architecture Explorer to understand existing code
• Visualizing existing code using dependency graphs

Wrox.com Code Downloads for this Chapter

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=1118314081 on the Download Code tab. The files are in the Chapter 15 download folder and individually named as shown throughout this chapter.

Every software developer has been in the following situation at some point in time: You have just started a new job with a new company, and you're expecting to go 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 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. 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 ...