Integrating a reverse engineering tool with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET

Some software engineering research tools remain in shadow because of the lack of integration and interoperability with well known commercial development environments. We investigate and provide a solution to integrate Rigi, a research tool used for software reverse engineering, with the Microsoft Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET) integrated development environment (IDE). We use the add-in framework of VS.NET to access the IDE objects to allow VS.NET and Rigi to interoperate. A new component, called Rigi add-in, is created to provide .NET developers the possibility of using the features of the Rigi tool. This allows developers to combine both forward and reverse engineering techniques in complementary ways. One contribution of this work includes the improved access and potential adoption of an existing research solution by embedding it in a popular commercial environment.