Visual Studio [Ultimate] 2010 Visualization & Modeling Feature Pack RTM now available on MSDN Subscribers Download

“The Visual Studio 2010 Visualization & Modeling Feature Pack expands the scenarios for exploring and understanding your code. Extend the capabilities of the visualization and modeling tools in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate… “

Feature Packs are like Power Tools in that they are being released “out of cycle” from Visual Studio, but different in that they are “official” and supported. If you can remember back when, think “NT4 Option Pack”. Per Jason Zander, “Feature Packs are a new concept we are introducing with VS2010.  Like Power Tools these releases are designed to run on top of the existing core bits (no modifications allowed) using extensibility.  Unlike Power Tools, Feature Packs are ideas we fully intend to incorporate into the core product in the future (consider it a head start on v-next).  Because of this a Feature Pack is of higher quality:  localized, fully tested, and formally supported.  Feature Packs are available through your MSDN subscription”

For more information about this Feature Pack, please see;

• Microsoft UK Developer Tools Team - Preview of Feature Pack for Visual Studio 2010 Visualisation and Modelling Tools
• Skinner's Blog - Sneak peek at the first “Feature Pack” for VS2010 Visualization and Modeling Tools & Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack is now Available! 

Jason Zander's WebLog - Announcing: VS2010 Productivity Power Tools and Modeling Feature Packs

“…

Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack

The modeling feature pack provides increased support for visualization (web sites as well as C/C++ code), new UML support, and increased support for layer diagram extensibility to Visual Studio Ultimate 2010.  Cameron Skinner did a great job giving a sneak peak of the feature pack here.  Let me highlight a few items here as well.

Web Site Visualization

Hopefully you have already discovered the power of DGML and architectural dependency graphs for your .NET code (read more about it here). In this release we’ve added support for the structure of your web sites. …

C/C++ (Native Code) Visualization Support

The VS2010 RTM product supports the .NET Framework (versions 1.1 –> 4).  I have received many requests for C/C++ support as well which is now included in this release. …

UML Class Diagram Code Generation

VS Ultimate 2010 added support for the most popular UML diagram types including Class Diagrams.  This release also adds the ability to generate code from your UML diagram targeting the correct T4 template.  Here is a sample class diagram for customers with orders: …

Creating UML Class Diagram from Code

Generating code from a diagram is great when you start with your model.  But often you already have an existing project without diagrams.  With the feature pack you can drag namespaces from the Architecture Explorer to a UML diagram: …

XMI Import

This release enables XMI 2.1 import which makes it easier to bring UML compliant documents into Visual Studio.  For now you will only be able to important documents targeting the subset we support.  You should expect us to add more document types in future releases of the product. …

…”