Clemens Reijnen

Keyboard junkies have a hard time with all that dragging and dropping of shapes and connectors around within VSTS 2010. So here are some tips for these junkies how to keep you fingers on the keyboard.

New default DSL Tools behavior…

Adding shapes to the design surface allows you to directly start typing, for example after adding a class shape to the design surface lets you start typing the class name. Hitting 'Enter’ will confirm the value and F2 lets you edit it again.

More interesting, in the compartments of the class shape hitting Enter twice adds an attribute or operation.  So, type a name for an attribute, hit Enter to confirm the value and hit Enter again for adding a new attribute.
Very simple and also very quick for the creation of classes.

Fast diagram editing with shortcuts… 

With the default behavior you still have to drag and drop class shapes on the design surface. To eliminated this piece of mouse handling you can create your own keyboard shortcuts. Cameron pointed me to this environment settings in Options dialog screen. The architecture team has created a very nice an clean overview of all the actions you can execute in this dialog. So, adding your own shortcut keys is very easy. Below I added the shortcut key “Alt-C” in the context of the Logical Class Diagram for adding Class shapes to my design surface.

I also added the shortcut keys for adding Attributes and operations, just because setting the focus to the compartments isn’t that easy with shortcuts…

And when this is still to hard for you, you can buy a drawing tablet.. with a nice tablet overlay.

and you will look as happy as this guy…

although it just looks like he isn’t that comfortable with it…