The validation process itself was really slow. Room for improvement in the developer experience And even the term “layer diagram” did not clearly express the intent, which is to validate dependencies. You had to create a modeling project first, and then a layer diagram. The UX to create a layer diagram was not a simple process.
In the screenshot above, few of you probably knew how to use ”Forbidden Namespaces”, or “Required Namespaces”. The authoring experience, in particular the creation of layer diagrams, was not very discoverable or usable, because the terminology was a bit obscure. To summarize a little: although this feature has existed for a while, it could definitively be improved: Room for improvement in the authoring experience The latter automatically catches architecture regressions during continuous integration. The former obliged you to remember to do it. To validate the architecture, you could either right-click on the diagram and chose “Validate Architecture”, or do the validation at build time. Validating the architecture before VS Dev “15” For example, a property “Forbidden Namespace Dependencies” here indicates that the UI layer (selected on the diagram) should not depend on Owin (in the property window). You can also express additional constraints on each layer related to namespaces. The arrows express the permitted dependencies. The blue rounded rectangles are layers associated with code elements for example, here they represent assemblies, but they could be any set of code elements.
The screenshot below shows Visual Studio 2015 Update 3, where a layer diagram expresses the allowed dependencies between four layers. Previous experience: Layer validation in Visual Studio 2010-2015 Layer diagrams express architectural constraints So, in Visual Studio “15” Preview 5, we are introducing a new Dependency Validation experience to help ensure that you, developers, respect the architectural constraints of the application as you edit your code.īefore presenting the new experience, let me first recap what the experience is in previous versions of Visual Studio Enterprise (Layer diagrams). It first shipped in Visual Studio 2010, and is now part of Visual Studio Enterprise. The Layer designer enables you to validate architectural dependencies in your Visual Studio solutions.
In the past year, you told us that you considered removing unwanted dependencies to be an important part of managing your technical debt.