I’m sure most .Net developers have played around with the class
designer some at this point. Its a great tool for visualizing
class structures, interfaces, implementations and relationships, as
well as creating new classes. Personally, I’m still a “type it
out” kind of person. I guess I’m just a masochist in that way,
but I enjoy it.
Here’s what the class designer looks like, for those of you who are behind the times:
But here’s the beef I have with it. No disconnected
persistence model. That also just happens to be the same issue I
have always had with the Sql Server diagramming tool. In my
opinion, the class designer is not really a designer, its more of a
real-time implementor. If you make changes to the class designer
view, its going to make changes to your actual code in your project.
I would much rather have a true designer that lets me play around
with the classes and interfaces, try a couple of different ideas and
patterns as I rumble through the logic in my head, and then later
commit those changes to the actual project. It also would more
easily allow for 3rd party vendors to create some cool tools to use the
same persisted data on disk to do some cool things with the model as
well. I could take the persisted data file and pass it on to
somebody else to create a project from the model. As it stands
now, the designer has a direct relationship with the actual code,
making on the fly changes.
Again, same issue with the Sql Server Diagramming tool. No way to persist the data to disk.
So what we are left with now if you want to keep an external
designer model to play with and implement later, is 2 different
projects. But committing changes from the designer project to
your actual project that has your “real” code in it is no easy task
either (made easier with source safe merge tools and other 3rd party
compare/merge tools however). You can play around with the model,
but then when you’re done, you’ll have to get those changes over to a
different project where you are actually creating your application.
I’ve had this conversation with some other people, who all agree a
persistence model, whether XML, binary or even (although limiting) a
proprietary persitence model would be very, very useful. I’m
hoping this is something they are looking at seriously with the next
version (Orcas) of Visual Studio as an improvement to the class
designer tool. Would be nice to see the same type of
implementation with the Sql Server diagramming tool, making it more of
a true “designer” tool instead.