Introducing the Visual Designers—Visual Designers

Microsoft .NET Framework, ASP.NET, Visual C# (CSharp, C Sharp, C-Sharp) Developer Training, Visual Studio

Visual Designers

Visual design within Visual Studio is not new, hence the name "Visual" Studio. For some time there have been visual designers for Windows forms and web forms so that you can lay out your screen designs without resorting to code, and so that you can add behavior to buttons and other controls without having to remember how to code their event handlers. There are also other visual designers such as the XML schema designer.

The new suite of visual designers complements the existing set by providing capabilities for modeling the static aspects of your application architecture, deployment infrastructure, and lower-level object design. The complete list of new designers that we’ll be introducing in this chapter and covering indepth in this part of the book is as follows:

• Application Designer
  
• Logical Datacenter Designer
  
• System Designer
  
• Deployment Designer
  
• Class Designer

As stated earlier, the first four comprise the Distributed System Designers (formerly called "Whitehorse") that are unique to the Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Architects. Class Designer is not unique to that edition, so you’ll find it also in the Team Developer and Team Tester editions. We treat it as a member of the same set—rather than relegate it to another part of the book— because it operates in a similar fashion and contributes to the same overall visual modeling experience.

Each is covered in turn, although System Designer and Deployment Designer are covered together because they are intrinsically linked. Although you can use Application Designer and Logical Datacenter Designer individually, it makes little sense to use Deployment Designer without System Designer.

In fact, all of the designers are interrelated in very important ways via the common SDM format, as you’ll see later. All we’re saying here is that you can—and in fact, should—draw an Application Diagram separately from a Logical Datacenter Diagram, but it makes much less sense (arguably it’s not possible) to draw a Deployment Diagram without the benefit of a set of System Definitions.

Note that the existing designers for forms and XML schemas have a direct correspondence with the underlying code. This is true also of the new designers, which, unlike their UML equivalents, are not merely abstract representations of the underlying code.

As we introduce each of the visual designers, keep in mind that we’re doing just that—introducing them. Our aim is to provide only a preview of each of the diagram types, and to place those diagrams relative to one another in the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). As it happens, the diagrams that we use in the following preview are all taken from the StockBroker case study that runs through the subsequent chapters, but we’re not setting out to explain the details of that running example in this chapter. You’ll be introduced to it more formally at the end, as a road map for the chapters that follow.