I rarely use tools that generate code, however, one that has become a fixed asset of my programming toolbox is Visual Studio’s class designer. It’s a great productivity tool that helps you quickly visualize and understand the class structure of projects, classes and class members. It’s also great for presentation of code-base that does not come with a UI, e.g. a Class Library.

It also lets you quickly wire-frame your classes when doing top-down design, but it is limited in that aspect, for example it does not support Auto-Implemented Properties, which I tend to almost always use in my Types, instead it blurts out a verbose Property declaration along with a backing field. Fortunately, almost all of these issues are fixed with the great Modeling PowerToys Visual Studio add-in by Lie which turns Class Designer into an amazing tool.

When I finally upgraded from my beloved Visual Studio 2010 to 2013, in the midst of all the horrors of VS 2013, I also found out that this add-in has not been updated to support later versions and the original author seems to be inactive, so I upgraded it myself and decided to put it here for other fellow developers who also happen to like the tool:

Download Link

To install the add-in, extract the ZIP file contents to %USERPROFILE%\Documents\Visual Studio 2013\Addins and restart Visual Studio.

Please note that I’m not the author of this add-in, I merely upgraded it for VS 2013.