EmPowerTec UML and modeling blog

Hello!

Tangible has released a free (as in beer) AddIn for Visual Studio 2005 that supports the creation of some basic modeling diagrams within Visual Studio 2005. They don’t claim to be UML compliant which would be hard since they use the Microsoft DSL tools which are explicitly designed as an alternative to UML.

I had a look at this AddIn and here are my impressions:

Pros:

• Slick visual appearance
• Convenient interface due to reuse of Visual Studios interface elements
• Diagrams are part of the project
• Therefore, they are automatically integrated in the source code management systems

Cons:

• Existing classes cannot be dropped on diagram
• No repository or browser view of the modeled classes
• Almost no semantic information can be captured
• Obvious bug in the specification of superclasses (the field is named “subclasses”)

All in all I think it is a nice tool for people that wish to add some diagrams to their projects and thus improve the documentation. However, if you are seriously interested in using UML in Visual Studio you could consider Sparx Systems MDG link for Visual Studio (no, I’m not affiliated with them).

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, DSL, DSL Tools, Visual Studio 2005, modeling

Hello!

One of my older postings was submitted to dzone (thanks gst!). In the first 5 days after the submission 738 visitors have viewed this entry and 434 of them have clicked on the link and hopefully read my posting. So far, one comment was made.
The first two days we had no noteable traffic from dzone, then on friday about 40% of the overall traffic from dzone arrived, on saturday about 35%, on sunday about 15% and on monday about 10%.

dzone seems to be an interesting site, most of the articles seem to be of high quality. And it seems to have a significant community which keeps the fire burning. There are also quite a view postings about UML on dzone.

Best regards,
Andreas

Technorati Tags: dzone.com