TheNastySpiderman

THENASTYSPIDERMAN OVERVIEW

This is an Extension for Visual Studio which can flowchart any C# OR Visual Basic Procedure (VB) using a flowcharting method named Nassi–Shneiderman diagram (NSD) which is a graphical design representation for structured programming. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassi%E2%80%93Shneiderman_diagram.

EXAMPLE CS DIAGRAM EXAMPLE VB DIAGRAM

SETUP Since this Extension is so closely related to the original “VBFlowchartingExtension”, if you have it installed, you should disable or uninstall that extension first. Download TheNastySpiderman .VSIX file or choose Install while in Visual Studio. While Visual Studio is open, some first –time initialization needs to be done. Go to View-->Other Windows… and click Flowcharting Tools Window(Dockable). This should open up a Tool Window which has the key controls for the extension. The window looks as follows:

Since this tool window is dockable, it is suggested it be placed between the Solution Explorer and the Properties window as shown below:

This window should now stay in its place regardless of the number of times VS is started. One other detail. If you have code that is conditionally compiled it is strongly suggested that you download and install a helper program, which can be downloaded at: https://tablacus.github.io/scriptcontrol_en.html

OPERATION AND USE

Open Visual Studio and open a project or solution containing C# or VB code. Click anywhere (place the cursor) on a procedure you want to be flowcharted and click the Flowchart Button ( the one with the flowchart icon with tool-tip-text “Make flowchart of Procedure at current cursor position”). The Flowchart should be generated and displayed. The font in the flowchart can be changed by selecting the font in the VB Flowcharting Tools window and clicking the Flowchart button again. If you click the flowchart options button the following screen will be displayed:

The changes to the options window will only take effect when the next flowchart is generated. Feel free to “play” with the options.

ADDITIONAL DETAILS

• Additional flowchart and options buttons can also be found on the tool bar and in the Tools menu

• There is a provision for placing your flowcharts into a Company Drawing format. Not sure how useful this may be

• Once a flowchart is generated, you can click anywhere on the flowchart and the line of code where you clicked should be highlighted on the code page.

• If there are Breakpoint(s) on the procedure you flowcharted, they are highlighted on the flowchart with a Dark Brown (Siena) background. If this is not desired, delete the breakpoints and generate the flowchart again.

• The Next and Prev buttons on the Chart window will go forward or backward and generate a flowchart of the next or previous procedure in the current module. You can also use the Left and Right Arrow buttons for this. If you go forward at the end or hit Prev at the beginning, the program will sound a beep. TROUBLESHOOTING TIPS • Creating a flowchart involves two main steps:

1. Scanning through the source module looking for the start of a procedure. Once the start of the procedure is found the module is scanned to find the end of the procedure. The result is a list of the procedures in the module, the Begin Line and End Line of each Procedure and the Begin Line and End Line of the headers in the procedure. The headers are defined as all of the lines before the Begin Line of the procedure up until the beginning of the module or the end of the previous procedure.
2. When the user selects a line in the procedure and clicks the Do Flowchart button, an attempt to find the procedure is done using the list created in step 1. Then the module is scanned from the Begin Line to the End Line to create all the information needed to represent the flowchart. In the process, some source lines may have to be combined or some lines may have to be split so that the program is processing a single statement. Once this information is processed, the flowchart is “plotted” to the screen. • If the output flowchart does not look as expected, one possibility is that in the first step above, the beginning of the procedure was not found so it probably flowcharted the next procedure. One way was to view what procedures were found is to go to the Options Page and hover your mouse above the Procedures label. You will find a tool tip text that reads "You Found the Back-Door to Make Visible a Couple of Test Features". Click the mouse in that area and click the “Show Procedures” button. It will open a file showing all the procedures found and there begin and end lines. • If the flowchart looks like it attempting to flowchart the procedure you selected, you may find that program got confused, probably somewhere in step 2 above. • In either case, you can send your findings to thenastyspiderman@earthlink.net. Sometimes, however, you may be able to find a workaround to the problem. Sometimes, you can reformat a line or at least make it conform to a more conventional structure. We say this not to make an excuse for a lack of consistency in the program but it may be a way to create a correct flowchart in the meantime. In any case, this information may be useful to the process of creating a program update to solve the problem. In the process of finding a good solution we may be able to respond to your email with a temporary workaround. FINAL COMMENTS

• This Extension will always be intended to be free. It is placed in the preview mode, and comments, suggestions, and bug reports are welcome. Please, just be kind. Any information pertinent to making the bug reproducible would be helpful. Try not to send code that you feel would be proprietary to you or your company. You can send your issues to thenastyspiderman@earthlink.net

• Hopefully a help file will be provided soon

• I assume many will want support for flowcharting other languages (besides C# and VB). This may eventually happen depending on the interest.

• The source is not available to the public. However, this may change.

• A future addition may include being able to do debugging graphically with the flowchart. (Such features as setting breakpoints, single stepping through the flowchart, etc.)