| How
does this application work? How do you test the application’s
behaviour after you have made a modification, such as modifying
the structure of a table? This is all about Impact Analysis
… You know; Those tedious analyses we rarely make. Only
they are the only way to reduce the risk of mistakes while
maintaining applications and therefore the only way to reduce
the costs related to maintenance.
Thanks to Visual Expert you will be able to achieve complete
impact analyses on any VB objects in a few clicks (graphical
objects, functions, variable…)
Visual Expert also allows you to explore swiftly the application’s
code (far more quickly than with the VB explorer), it enables
you to display the structure of this code and most of all
it allows you to generate complete technical documentation
for your projects (HTML or RTF format).
Finally Visual Expert can also audit your
code to control the different elements’ naming rules
and to detect the dead code of the application. This isn’t
a tool especially dedicated to quality auditing but it has
features which can be useful.
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Analysing
your project
Before you can explore it, Visual Expert
will analyse your code. A wizard will help you declare your
project and define the list of VB elements you wish to be
analysed. You may take the elements one by one or import your
complete VB project’s file. I strongly recommend you
to use the latter. Visual Expert will then launch your project’s
code analysis. You can then almost instantly explore your
code in the Graphical Interface.
Exploring
the code
Visual Expert’s graphical interface
has three different parts; a tree view, displaying the structure
of the application, a “source code” view and a
“detail” view displaying information about the
element selected.
Visual
Expert’s graphical interface has three different parts |
The tree view
The tree view allows you to navigate in the structure of
the application: for each item (a method, a form, a property
for example) you can select one or more links (for example:
for a method: the method called or the calling method; for
a form, the list of controls).
This way of exploring the code is efficient and fast but
needs a bit of time to get used to (there are several different
lists of links offered). Once you have been trained you
will never be able to look for “who uses what?”
or to locate a method again without Visual Expert...
Thanks to the tree view Impact analyses are neatly displayed;
you will find all the scripts referring to such property
or such method in a few clicks …
The source code
view
The source code’s display allows you to navigate in
the code of the application directly as you would in an
HTML page. The code is coloured and the referenced methods
are hyperlinks.
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