Professional Visual Studio® 2010

Chapter 54. Visual Studio Ultimate for Architects

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Creating models of your solution

• Enforcing application architecture

• Exploring existing architectures

The VSTS Architecture edition offered four diagrams for designing distributed systems, which were almost never used by teams in production. These four diagrams have all been dropped in Visual Studio 2010 and all of the functionality targeted for architecture tasks is brand new. This functionality can be split into two broad categories.

The first new feature is Modeling Projects, which allow you to create UML diagrams to build up an application model. There is also a new diagram that can be used to determine and enforce certain relationships between code elements in your projects.

The other new features all revolve around navigating and understanding existing code bases. This includes the ability to generate sequence diagrams from C# and VB methods, as well as Dependency Graphs of various components in your solution. Finally, Visual Studio 2010 includes the new Architecture Explorer, which is used to quickly navigate your solution.

MODELING PROJECTS

A model in software terms is an abstract representation of some process or object. You create models to better understand and communicate to others the way different parts of the application are intended to work. In Visual Studio 2010, you keep all of your models together in a Modeling Project. Modeling Projects are found on their own page in the Add New Project dialog. ...