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Chapter 5: Creating and Building Projects 137
Using the Class Designer
When working with a project, it can sometimes be helpful to have a high-level view of
the project contents, especially if someone else has created the project and you haven’t
worked with that project before. This is where the Class Designer can help. In addition to
code visualization, another capability of the Class Designer is to give you a basic tool to
perform some design yourself. We’ll look at visualizing existing classes first.
Class Designer Visualization
Whenever you select a project in Solution Explorer, you’ll see the Class Designer button
appear in the Solution Explorer toolbar. The Class Designer button also appears on the
Class View window. Clicking View Class Diagram will produce a diagram of classes in
your solution, shown in Figure 5-13.
As you can see in Figure 5-13, VS produces a new file, named ClassDiagram1.cd,
with a visual representation of your code. You can see that the properties window is open,
allowing you to view information about the selected Program class. Additionally, the
Figure 5-13 Visualizing code with the Class Designer