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Comment by AlexC04 | Hacker News Reader

Can visual studio do the graphical representation of a C# codebase? A javascript file?

Looking at Coati.io it can't do those languages yet, but the graphical flow chart looks really amazing to me and I'de love to try it out on my own code.

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Class descriptions are not only put into diagrams, they're interactive controls. Ten years ago, the model-driven development trends focused on making more and more of the code driveable by UI representations and code. People tried to model code using UML or UML-like representations, with two-way links. Tooling inferred models from existing code.

For more current approaches, see "Code Maps" in the VS 2015 release notes here - https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/releasenotes/vs2015-...

Doing proper control flow is done less often for the reasons I explained. Profilers do it better. See e.g. the Call Graph in AQTime: https://support.smartbear.com/viewarticle/43205/ - it lets you drill through the callers and callees of each function as seen in practice. This means it can see through polymorphism, reflection, dynamic loading, function pointers - all the things that make static analysis infeasible.

(Note: VS Entreprise is $6000 away. I see a market for cheaper code visualisation tools...)

Visual Studio does, but only in the "Enterprise" configuration($6K per seat). I haven't used it to be able to speak to its quality.

Well you have the class view which tells you a lot. And you have the object browser which is very useful too. It's not quite the same but I think it tells you a lot about a class without having to do masses of reading.

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