Software developers, programmers, and architects share the same habit of diagramming on white-boards. Lots of actual codes are developed based on the ideas implied in these diagrams or graphs. In fact, these visual elements become an essential part when the code or system is going to be made available to other people, users, new developers, customers, etc. Traditionally, software development involves the modelling step before and around the coding in order to capture the meta-knowledge. How about some efforts to make these steps easier and faster?
The Code Canvas prototype in MS research lab shows an interesting step toward an automation of creating code maps which eases the understanding of complex code structures and class diagrams. As shown in Kael Rowan's blog entry (here), the Code Canvas seems to be a future add-on to Visual Studio. As mentioned in an article at ACM COMMUNICATION ("Software Development with Code Maps," Vol. 53, No. 08, 2010), having a decent code map makes it much faster for newcomers to adapt into the project and complete their tasks.
