Friday, November 6, 2009

[Tutorial] UML with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2

As an Architect you get to use UML quite often in your daily work. A good diagram can say much more than text and – if well done - is easy understandable and shareable amongst team members and the management.

Microsoft announced some time ago that it endorses UML and that it set a core focus on modeling. It therefore announced its membership in the standards body Object Management Group™ (OMG™).

Microsoft-UML-banner logo-omg

The next version of Visual Studio will include a quite sophisticated set of tools and features for UML Modeling and its associated Code Generation.

I recently installed Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2 in a Hyper-V Virtual Machine to test these new UML features. The following steps are necessary to use them.
  • Create a new project of type “Modeling Project”
VS2010_B2_ModelingProject
  • This will create the basic structure for the UML Models
VS2010_B2_ModelingProject2
  • There are 7 diagram choices currently possible in the Beta 2 release, Add a “UML Class Diagram”
VS2010_B2_ModelingProject3
  • The Toolbox is now filled with elements that are useful for the creation of classes and class relationships
UMLClassDiagram1
  • Add some elements and design your classes
UMLClassDiagram2UMLClassDiagram3
  • Add a “UML Sequence Diagram”, the Toolbox is now filled with elements that are useful for the creation of interactions
UMLSequenceDiagram1
  • Add some elements and design your interactions
UMLSequenceDiagram2
  • Add a “UML Use Case Diagram”, the Toolbox is now filled with elements that are useful for the creation of use cases
  • UMLUseCaseDiagram1
  • Add some elements and design your use cases (note that it is not possible to declare extension points in the Beta 2 release at the moment)
UMLUseCaseDiagram2
  • Add a “UML Activity Diagram”, the Toolbox is now filled with elements that are useful for the creation of actions
UMLActivityDiagram1
  • Add some elements and design your actions (note that there are sometimes little display problems, especially when using decision nodes and input pins)
UMLActivityDiagram2
  • Add a “UML Component Diagram”, the Toolbox is now filled with elements that are useful for the creation of components and component relationships
UMLComponentDiagram1
  • Add some elements and design your components (note that Delegations and Part Assemblies don’t work in the Beta 2 release)
UMLComponentDiagram2
  • The “Layer Diagram” and “Directed Graph Document” are no UML Diagrams, so I won’t discuss them in this article
  • You can use the new UML Model Explorer to see all elements for all diagrams in one place
UMLModelExplorer
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You might be interested to know that I describe the new Visual Studio 2010 UML features in a new book "UML Software Design with Visual Studio 2010".

Tony Loton

http://www.lotontech.com/uml

lakshitha prabath wijesinghe said...

great thanx!!