Generate data-flow diagrams from VB.NET source?

Question

Is there any tool available which can generate data-flow diagrams and entity relationship diagrams directly from VB.NET source code?

Answer 1

Not answering exactly your needs, Doxygen has some capabilities in this area for several common languages. It uses the Graphviz package.

Answer 2

Doxygen can create entity relationship diagrams directly from source code. It will be at its most powerful if you've been annotating the sources in Doxygen's markup style. I can heartily recommend adopting Doxygen for C/C++ language development projects...

It doesn't (at least not the last I checked) do dataflow diagrams.

All of its diagrams are actually produced by describing them in the dot language understood by AT&T's Graphviz package.

It certainly would be possible to draw dataflow diagrams using graphviz, but to do it automatically from source you'd have to have enough of a parser to find the dataflow in the first place. There is an XML backend for GCC that might provide the information needed to implement this, but it certainly isn't a trivial project.

I've hand-crafted a fair number of diagrams in graphviz. I've found it most valuable when I have a bag-o-facts and need to find some visualization about how they relate. The most complicated recently was a drawing of all of the players in a complicated, long running legal case. After listing each of the twenty or so parties, it was just a matter of adding one line to the dot source file for each pair that identified their connection. Graphviz takes care of all of the layout nastyness, and the resulting figure made it a lot easier to explain why the case was interesting.