Windows Developer Power Tools

8.2 Improving Visual Studio’s Designers with the PowerToy for Class and Distributed Systems Designers

Visual Studio 2005’s Class Designer provides a great way to visualize and interact with code models, using UML-like shapes to let you define classes, interfaces, inheritance, and class members such as properties and members. The Distributed Systems Designer enables you to lay out architectural diagrams with great ease.

While Designers bring a lot of power to developers and architects, there are a lot of annoying things about them: moving around in large diagrams is painful, it’s impossible to search for a particular class, and creating associations between objects is difficult.

The PowerToy for the Visual Studio 2005 Class and Distributed Systems Designers fills these gaps and provides quite a bit of additional functionality to boot. The PowerToy is broken into two components: Class Designer Enhancements and Design Tools Enhancements. The two work together to greatly improve the usability of the Class Designer.

PowerToy at a Glance
Tool	PowerToy for the Visual Studio 2005 Class and Distributed Systems Designers
Version covered	Final release
Home page	http://www.gotdotnet.com/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=fe72608b-2b28-4cc1-9866-ea6f805f45f3
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/133
Summary	Improves usability and features of the Class and Distributed Systems Designers
License type ...