One of the first questions people seem to ask when they see the Dependency Graph features of Visual Studio 2010 is whether it can also be used to visualized runtime object graphs.

In this Video (WMV, or MP4) I will show you how that can be done using the SOS debugger extensions and specifically the GCRoot command.  I've used this technique several times to help figure out some really complex memory leak bugs and so I'm confident you will find this to be a useful tool to add to your toolbox of tricks.

The code for the GCRootToDGML tool is available to download so you can try this out yourself, it should work with any recent version of Visual Studio 2010.

The Architecture Explorer in Visual Studio 2010 allows you to navigate through all sorts of interesting relationships in your code.  It also allows you to create new Directed Graph Documents so you can visualize whatever relationships you explore and it provides a nifty ability to save and replay those queries using DGQL.  

I have posted a new Video (WMV or MP4) that shows how it works and below you will find a link to the DGQL queries that I used in this video.   I hope you enjoy the show.

DGQL.zip (1.25 kb)

Vice President of the Developer Division, Somasegar, posted a blog about architecture tools in Visual Studio 2010 including some interesting dependency graph screen shots.

So to follow up on that I have posted a new Video (WMV or MP4)on Beta 2 bits that demos how this dependency graph feature works in more detail, and the video is a lovely big HD resolution (1280 x 720) so you can really see what's going on.

When I show this to customers the reaction I get is excitement followed by "finally, I can see the big picture" of my code.  Customers often find big things to improve in their code in the first 5 minutes of browsing with this tool.

Visual Studio 2010 has some really cool graph visualization technology.  Cameron Skinner first introduced DGML about 9 months ago and now that VS 2010 Beta 2 has shipped it's time for an update.

This video (WMV or MP4) takes you through some great demos to give you an idea of what it can do.  This is just a 10 minute teaser, in subsequent posts I'll drill into all the various software visualization features in more detail.

I think you'll agree that this is pretty exciting stuff and I can't wait to see all the amazing things that people will do with this new capability.

The following download contains the DGML demos used in this video: Demos.zip (542.37 kb)