System Design Pointer
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What tool do you use to design your class interaction? 1. Pencil and paper 2. Visual Studio 3. Mind Mapping program 4. or something else Most of the things I have worked on before have been small projects or ones that pretty much had just one solution. I have to rewrite our main product. It is suppose to be all inclusive, containing all of the tools that live outside the product now. I'm upgrading it from VB6. There is a lot of inline functionality that I want to break into reusable classes and make the project more modular to simplify upgrading in the future. Everyone refers to it as the house of cards because any changes usually make the whole crash. I'm just stuck as to where to start with designing the class layout and interaction. I have toyed with Visual Studio and XMind for roughing out the classes. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Where do you start?
Brad Deja Moo - When you feel like you've heard the same bull before.
You may wish to consider a more agile approach... I would recommend reading "applying uml and patterns" by Craig Larman. The answer to your question then becomes Whiteboard.
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VS2010 ultimate comes with UML diagram editors
Pedis ex oris Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur
Ah, forgot about that. I dimly remember seeing the feature in the trial version, but I never bothered to even look at it because I already had EA. ;)
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mixture of: - pen && paper - Whiteboard (and occasionally surrounding wall, but then even as a child i had trouble colouring within the lines) - brain (entirely optional) - trial && error (mainly the latter) - dreams (true story, once went to bed with a design problem on my mind, woke up to find the answer scribbled on a piece of paper along with 2 other problems i needed to solve and hadn't previously thought of!)
Pedis ex oris Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur
How about a keyboard and start typing furiously?
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What tool do you use to design your class interaction? 1. Pencil and paper 2. Visual Studio 3. Mind Mapping program 4. or something else Most of the things I have worked on before have been small projects or ones that pretty much had just one solution. I have to rewrite our main product. It is suppose to be all inclusive, containing all of the tools that live outside the product now. I'm upgrading it from VB6. There is a lot of inline functionality that I want to break into reusable classes and make the project more modular to simplify upgrading in the future. Everyone refers to it as the house of cards because any changes usually make the whole crash. I'm just stuck as to where to start with designing the class layout and interaction. I have toyed with Visual Studio and XMind for roughing out the classes. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Where do you start?
Brad Deja Moo - When you feel like you've heard the same bull before.