Class View Pane: An Overlooked Visual Studio Gem
Posted in Development
For me, a quick way to see if a project is properly structured is to go to View | Class View. This is one badly overlooked but handy Visual Studio tool.
Class View gives you a general idea of whether you created a good namespace structure, whether classes have decent names, etc. This is where you catch bizarre class names like _Default.
For example, below is a screenshot of a brand new site created off the Small Business Starter Kit:
Class View reveals that the project is flat like a pancake, no logical structure in sight. The fact that it’s a web site, not a Web Application Project (WAP), somewhat explains this chaos, but that’s a different story (a post is coming, believe me).
6 comments
RichB
on March 13, 2009
It's staggering how many people think that adding regions to your code is the best way to group methods, fields, properties when Class View does it for you.
Milan Negovan
on March 13, 2009
RichB: hear hear! Regions are a good code small just begging for refactoring.
Milan Negovan
on March 13, 2009
Francois, I do have a real story, but I can't talk about internal projects on the blog. :)
The project above is disorganized in an exact same way.
Paul Mackintosh
on December 13, 2009
I'm using Visual Web Developer and was looking to get an overview of my ASP.Net page classes (that are within a 'Web Site' template as opposed to class library or 'Web Application') in Class View.
Can I?
Milan Negovan
on December 16, 2009
Paul, I don't have Visual Web Developer installed, but I believe that Class View is available in every edition of Visual Studio.
Francois Vanderseypen
on March 12, 2009
That's a bit disappointing, why didn't you include the actual story or point of view?