Chapter 54
Visual Studio Ultimate for Architects
WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?
- Creating models of your solution
- Enforcing application architecture
- Exploring existing architectures
The last few versions of Visual Studio have seen wide swings in functionality for architectural features. To a certain extent, these changes were driven by corresponding changes of opinion in how Visual Studio should deal with application architecture. The result is that features related to architectural concepts now fall into one of two broad categories: modeling and exploration.
On the modeling side is the ability to create UML Diagrams that you can use to build up an application model. And you can use one of the diagrams to determine and enforce certain relationships between code elements in your projects.
The other category includes a number of features that 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. And Visual Studio 2012 includes the 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 2012, you keep all your models together in a Modeling Project. You can find Modeling ...
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