Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio® 2010

Chapter 3. Top-Down Design with Component and Class Diagrams

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• How to create and use component diagrams

• How to show the internal parts of a component diagram

• How to create and use a class diagram

Chapter 2 discussed use case, activity, and sequence diagrams, and how they can be used to understand the problem space, as well as to begin mapping out how the application should be built and what the application is trying to accomplish. Once you have that information under your belt, the next step is to start trying to visualize (from a high level) the structure of the system, and then drill down into the classes and other objects that will be used by the application. This is where component diagrams and class diagrams come in.

This chapter begins by introducing component diagrams. It will break down an existing component diagram to provide a good understanding of all the parts that are available. It will look at all the elements from the component diagram toolbox, as well as describe all the different properties available to all the elements. The component diagram discussion will wrap up with step-by-step instructions on how to create a component diagram, as well as how to use a component diagram to model the internal workings of higher-level components.

After that, it is all about UML class diagrams (formerly known as logical class diagrams). As with component diagrams, this chapter examines some existing class diagrams, and covers the different toolbox elements and ...