Developing a Visual Code-dependency Analysis Tool for the Visual Studio IDE: Research Meets Practice in Showing Containment in an Interactive Diagramming Tool

The Microsoft Visual Studio IDE includes various tools for diagrammatic code understanding. I am currently involved in the final stages of preparing the next major version (11) for release later this year. In particular, I am working on a visual dependency analyzer that enables developers to dynamically build up a diagram from a particular piece of code or functionality. In designing and developing this product we have explored a number of methods for showing containment of various code elements to different types of grouping. Such a grouping⎯for example, members within types, types within namespaces, and so on⎯is fundamental to organizing object-oriented software, but is also the ticket to scalability of diagrams representing code. That is, grouping at various levels provides degrees of abstraction that can be applied to reduce the complexity of the visualization.