For all these years if a .Net architect has to model the software system. He or she has to rely on modeling tools like Rational XDE, or Visio Enterprise Architect. I had tried my hands on Visio Enterprise architect’s modeling support and code generation it has to offer. But I was not impressed by it even though Visio has several stencils, templates, symbols available; UML modeling and associated code generation was always bit cumbersome also it was difficult to sync up models with code and vice a versa was another challenge.  3rd party tools like Rational XDE has good support for .NET but one has to pay hefty license fees to use such tools.

Result of this, my system modeling used to get constrained into Microsoft Word, Power Points, Visio’s. Keeping Word/Visio based models up to date w.r.to the architecture, design, code changes was always a catching game leading the code, designs and overall system documentation out of synch impacting traceability between these artifacts.

Increasingly this has caused the disharmony between architecture modeling and development teams.

After all these years, finally, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010(VS2010) seem to have helped overcome this obstacle by embracing Unified Modeling Language (UML) and making architecture, design, development, testing seamlessly possible through its Integrated development environment

Given below are some of the new design & Architecture feature

1. Architecture Explorer – to discover and identify existing code assets and architecture in number of ways including graphs, stacked diagrams and dependency matrices.
2. Ability to create and share various types of diagrams like use case, activity and sequence diagrams.
3. Modeling tools that are tightly integrated with code and thus helps in keeping model and code in sync.
4. Architectural Validations – Ways to put constraints on code using models and doing validations at the time of check-ins and builds.
5.  Architecture Layer Diagram – One of the most useful and simple tool getting introduced. It allows representing your application architecture in form of layers and showing dependencies between them. It also allows to map physical components like classes, namespaces etc. to map to these layers. After all mappings you can validate whether the code meets the expected mappings and constraints.
6.  Microsoft joins OMG and UML gets introduced in Visual Studio 2010.
7.  Support for UML 2.1.1 – 5 out of 13 diagrams – use case, component, activity, class and sequence diagrams.
8. Ability to keep all the UML diagrams in sync so that a change in one automatically reflects on others.
9.  Will be interoperable with Visio 1.1 templates.
10.  Supports Top to bottom design approach.
11. Supports Bottom to top design approach – reverse engineer. Filter based on namespaces, number of level deep.
12.  Model Explorer – Similar to Solution Explorer, this allows you to explore all the models you have created which includes objects created as part of various UML diagrams – logical view.
13.  Ability to create a Sequence Diagram from existing source, simply by right clicking in the VS code editor and selecting “Generate Sequence Diagram…”

However this is not all with VS2010 architecture modeling support.  I will get into more details of it when I explore more features.