Friday, October 05, 2012

Powering up your DGML with the DgmlPowerTools

Visual Studio Gallery - DgmlPowerTools

DGML Power Tools is a VSIX package for Visual Studio 2012 that adds a bunch of handy new DGML related features, including export to SVG, Drag/Drop of images, Graph Diff, and new providers for the Architecture Explorer.

Save as SVG

You will see the "Save as SVG" command in the Directed Graph Document Context Menu, you can specify a file name ending with .svg and you will then see the result loaded in IE.

Neighborhood mode, which is on the Directed Graph Document toolbar:
This command allows you to automatically hide too much detail n-steps away from the selected nodes where “n” defaults to 1, but this neighborhood distance can be selected in the drop down you see next to the icon there.

Drag/Drop icons onto the canvas so you can wire them up with links and groups and create some really nice looking diagrams:

In fact you can drag any file on to the canvas to get a node with a Reference attribute pointing at that file
(which is then handy for “Goto->Reference” command).

Graph Diff

You will see the graph compare command in the Directed Graph Document context menu:

This command loads a 3rd graph window with the graph result showing what was added or removed:

File System Provider

For the architecture explorer:
This "Browse" action allows you to navigate down into your file system where can walk right into DGML files or Assemblies like this:

This makes it easier to then graph subsets of those files.

image..."

Not something I see extended, enhanced or getting the Power Tool treatment, so had to blog about this... The only thing that could make this better would be if the source were available, but still, I like free too... :)

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