Hyperlinks in DGML

 

They are really very useful for keeping all your documents and artifacts accessible via a double-click inside Visual Studio. You don’t even have to use VS for development anymore; you can use it as a shell (I should say window) to whatever is important to you; you can even use DGML as an alternative to Windows Explorer.

Here is how I do it with my projects; the one below is the (internal) ReadMe document for a script library that generates DGML using AWK (self-documented, should I say?):

The first hyperlink takes me to the To Do list:

where I can see what to do first: Learning Architecture Explorer (it is not a trivial tool to get a grasp on).

The third one to the Specifications document:

From there I can go to the Design guide as well as to the scripts involved:

Here is some code from the dgml_print.gawk script:

function printlinks(links, r, parent, child, groupstr)
{
    for (r in links) {
        split(r, pc, SUBSEP)    # pc: parentchild
        parent = pc[1]
        child = pc[2]
        groupstr = ""
        if (parent in groups) groupstr = " Category=’Contains’ "
        printf("<Link Source=’%s’ Target=’%s’ %s/>n", parent, child, groupstr)
    }
}

I can also have a more detailed view of the functionality involved:

If we look at the “To Deploy…” box:

we have access to all the documents that we have to check before deployment; e.g. Dependencies:

with two boxes expanded:

So VS gives me instant access to all code albeit written in a non-VS language, as well as to all other artifacts.