Class View Pane: An Overlooked Visual Studio Gem

Published: 3/12/2009 | Updated: 3/12/2009 | Discuss

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 within Visual Studio

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).

Comments

1 Francois Vanderseypen | Thursday, March 12, 2009 at 9:40 PM

That's a bit disappointing, why didn't you include the actual story or point of view?

2 RichB | Friday, March 13, 2009 at 12:29 AM

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.

3 Milan Negovan | Friday, March 13, 2009 at 6:00 AM

RichB: hear hear! Regions are a good code small just begging for refactoring.

4 Milan Negovan | Friday, March 13, 2009 at 8:40 AM

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.

5 Paul Mackintosh | Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 8:13 AM

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?

6 Milan Negovan | Wednesday, December 16, 2009 at 8:14 AM

Paul, I don't have Visual Web Developer installed, but I believe that Class View is available in every edition of Visual Studio.

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