Introduction to Directed Graph Markup Language ( DGML )

Introduction to Directed Graph Markup Language ( DGML )

Couple of weeks ago I spoke with Ohad Israeli about his conclusions from IDCC conference, it seems like more and more people like to hear about Architecture and Methodology rather than another Developer language or technique.

In my previous post I showed the new features of VS2010 – Visualize Code Relationships (Archicture), as we all know Visual Studio Team System 2010 comes with many new abilities especially in the Testing , Architecture area.

In my upcoming posts I’ll focus about Architecture with Visual Studio Team System 2010 Architecture Edition.

DGML, or "Directed Graph Markup Language" is what we are using in VSTS 2010 Architecture to render graphs like the one below:

Open Visual Studio Team System 2010, go to “View” menu and “Architecture Explorer”.

Create new DGML document.

To see DGML code “Right Click” and click “View DGML”

Add a Link element as a child element to the Links node, with a Source and Target attribute, you'll get something similar to this:

You can add more links and define different source and target.

You'll notice the elements isn't even needed to render the graph above.
This is all you need to know to visualize all kinds of data.