As I had mentioned a few months ago, I moved to Shanghai a couple of years back to start a new engineering team for VS Team Architecture.  Now that we have announced the product at PDC and have released a CTP version of the product I'll start sharing some of the details around the work we have been doing.

If you missed PDC, you can watch the recorded sessions posted at Channel 9.

You can view Peter Provost's talk on VS Team Architecture here.

Cheers,

Ramesh.

Someone pointed out that the link I provided for the powertoys is no longer valid.  This is because we have moved all the shared projects from GotDotNet to CodePlex.

You will now be able to download the Class Designer Powertoys for VS 2008 from http://www.codeplex.com/modeling.

 Cheers,

Ramesh.

The past few months, well, it'll be almost a year in November, I have been living in Shanghai, China.  As you may have heard, Developer Division has started a development center here.  I moved here to build a team for developing features for Visual Studio Team Architecture edition.

It has been a tremendous experience so far, both personally and professionally. 

The first 6 months here I was engaged in helping the Class Designer team complete support for Native C++ and also some new language features in C# and VB.  I was also involved in development of .Net VB controls like Line and Shape, PrintForm etc.

The Team Architecture team was formed in mid-May and we are now engaged in building features for the Rosario release of Visual Studio.

I hope to start blogging more often.

Cheers,

Ramesh.

Come and join members from the Visual Studio Team System product group to discuss features available in Visual Studio Architect, Developer and Tester editions and Team Foundation Server. There will be experts on hand to answer your questions, so we hope to see you there!

 Join the chat on Wednesday September 6th, 2006 10:00am - 11:00am Pacific time.

 To add this to your calendar, click here.

To see your local time of when this chat is, click here.

Cheers,

Ramesh.

We had quite a few people attend the webcast.  If you missed it you can view it from here.

Thanks,

Ramesh.

There will be a public chat on June 15th between 8 and 9 a.m PST where team members from class designer as well as application designer, logical datacenter designer, and deployment designer will be available to answer any questions you may have on these designers.  Experts from the development, testing and program management team will also be on hand to answer questions in those areas.

When: Wednesday, June 15th, 2005 @ 8:00am - 9:00 am (PST)

Link to the chat room: http://msdn.microsoft.com/chats/#05_0615_DN_08

Looking forward to answering your questions.

Cheers,

Ramesh.

We’ve published a set of set of add-ins which augments existing functionality in the Visual Studio 2005 Class Designer,  Here is the link to the download site.

This only works with the Beta 2 build.  It has some cool features like Pan/Zoom Window, MSDN Help on System Types, Dongles for easy creation of associations and inhertiance lines etc.  You can find the list of all the cool features enabled by the add-ins here.  There is also an add-in for the Distributed System Designer (available from the same download).

Note that the Powertoys have been moved from GotDotNet to the CodePlex site.  Class Designer PowerToys for VS 2008 can be found at http://www.codeplex.com/modeling.

Cheers,

Ramesh Rajagopal.

If you have created class diagrams using Visual Studio Beta 1, they will not open in Beta 2.  However, since the class diagram files persistence format is XML, Oleg from the Class Designer team has created a stylesheet to convert these diagrams to Beta 2.  Steps on how to do so is explained here (in the class designer team's blog).

Cheers,

Ramesh.

The class designer newsgroup is now replaced by the Class Designer Forum.  This is a technical forum to ask and answer questions regarding class designer.

Cheers,

Ramesh.

Part 3 of the interview with John is now available here.  In this one he talks about the various challeges building a V1 feature, what went into the decision making process and role of customers in guiding the design of the product and its future direction.

Ramesh.

Part 2 of John Stallo's interview with Josh Ledgard can be seen here.

Ramesh.

Josh Ledgard, PM in Visual Studio recently interviewed John (PM for Class Designer).  The video for the first part of the interview can be viewed here (Channel 9).

I really liked the intro text Josh had written to the video:

I've now done a few interviews with my co-workers building Visual Studio 2005.  I always like to ask "Aside from your own feature, What is your favorite new thing about Visual Studio 2005?"  The answer I consistently received was "the class Designer".  It will be available in versions of VS 2005 from Standard on up.

It is great to see the endorsements we get from our co-workers!

Ramesh.

Class Designer will be availabe on all Visual Studio Editions Standard and above.  There seems to be some confusion that Class Designer will only be available in Team Architect and Team Dev SKUs, so we wanted to make it clear that it is not the case.  However, it will not be available on the Express Editions.

Regards,

Ramesh.

In his blog, Modeling as a Productivity Enhancer in Visual Studio Team System, Barry raises excellent points regarding the areas where the Class Designer can really help developer productivity in the code generation scenarios.  I couldn't agree more.

However, class designer being a V1 product in Visual Studio, we had to make some hard choices on scenarios we want to focus on and successfully deliver them with high quality.

Firstly, we wanted to make sure that class diagrams created are made relevant throughout the development cycle - too often we have heard complaints from developers using UML tools that while the class diagrams they create are great to do initial design, they often go out of date once actual development begins.

Secondly, we wanted to make sure that creating and using class diagrams are easy and approachable to developers.  The diagrams should speak the language the developers are familiar with - the language they program in.

John Stallo, the Program Manager for Class Designer elaborates on these goals in his blog entry "A picture is worth a thousand words" (http://blogs.msdn.com/classdesigner/archive/2005/02/25/380023.aspx).

With the main focus on these two goals, we had to cut back on some of the cool productivity features you list above in terms of initial class design.  As you correctly point out, there are some types of edits that are better performed in the code editor and some that are intuitive to perform in the class designer.  We picked a few of them - interface implementation, overriding members, etc.  The Class Designer team will continue to blog highlighting more of these features in the upcoming weeks in its blog.

Integrating support for code snippets is probably one of the features we should have added support for but missed.  It was something we discussed but we didn't push hard enough to get it in.  The same goes for grouping members based on interface implementation, code regions (although this was cut because of some technical difficulties).

What other productivity features would you like more?  We have already gotten several suggestions from people like Daniel Moth, Tony Loton, and many others.  If you have the time please log bugs for your suggestions here:  http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/

This will enable us to collect data on what features customers request the most.

Cheers,
Ramesh Rajagopal.
Class Designer Team.

John, our PM is collecting feedback on the need and value of visualizing relationships other than inheritance and associations on class diagrams in the class designer team blog.  Your perspective on this is very much appreciated.

Cheers,

Ramesh.

Thanks for your feedback/comments on this decision.  As I mentioned, this was a very difficult decision we had to make.  Remember, when we started this project, we could have very well said we are not going to support C++ and spent our resources on other cool features that we had to cut for V1.  Instead we continued on our effort to support C++ and only when we realized that we couldn't deliver a high quality product that we made the difficult decision to cut this feature.  We felt that support for Intellisense, Project and Build System which are heavily used features required more attention to quality.  Certainly support for C++ in Class Designer will be a very high priority in the upcoming releases.

Ramesh.

Today we announced that support for C++ in the Class Designer has been cut.  There were several tools in C++ that required attention – for example support for Intellisense, Project System, Build System, Class Diagramming, etc.  We believed that we will not be able to address all the issues in all of these features by product release.  In the end we decided to concentrate on those features that will benefit the C++ developer the most and delivering a high quality experience around them.  Personally this was a very difficult and highly emotional decision for me as our team had spent considerable time and effort into enabling support for C++.

Your thoughts and feedback are welcome.

Ramesh.

We have now set up a class designer team blog where various members of the class designer team will be posting articles regularly on class designer.  Here is the link to that blog.  The first installment is from John Stallo, our Program Manager.  This article gives an insight into a couple of the key goals around Class Designer V1.  As always your feedback is very much appreciated.

Cheers,

Ramesh.