UML, T4 and Visual Studio 2010, Oh my…

Oleg Sych -  UML Modeling and Code Generation in Visual Studio 2010

“This article provides an overview of UML modeling in Visual Studio 2010. Assuming that reader is already familiar with UML, it focuses on custom UML profiles - an extensibility mechanism that can be used to tailor UML models to a particular problem domain. Readers will see an example of such a profile, which extends UML Class Diagrams for database modeling. Finally, the article shows how code can be generated from UML models using T4 text templates.

…

UML Modeling in Visual Studio

Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition includes a fully-featured UML (Unified Modeling Language) support, integrated into the IDE. You can create Use Case diagrams to summarize who uses your application or system, and what they can do with it, Class diagrams to describe logical aspects of data types and their relationships, Sequence diagrams to display interaction between classes, components and actors, Activity diagrams to document flow of an algorithm or a business process and Component diagrams to show structure of a system, and how it can be deployed to a logical environment.

…

Conclusion

As you can see, Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Edition provides powerful UML modeling tools that can be used for conceptual and logical analysis during software development. UML Profiles can be used to extend standard models and allow modeling information systems at physical level. A limited number of UML profiles is expected to ship with Visual Studio 2010. Custom profiles can be developed to tailor UML models to the needs of individual projects. Combined with T4 Text Templates, this gives developers a powerful tools for model-driven development of information systems, where large portions of the system can be modeled in UML and generated with T4. 

…”

I thought this was a great article on the UML support coming in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate… I appreciated the compare and contrast with the existing DSL diagramming (i.e. why we should be happy and how this support is going to make our dev lives better)

 

Related Past Post XRef:
“Practical UML™: A Hands-On Introduction for Developers” from the Embarcadero Developer Network