Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 10, Work with Visual Studio Tools

#81 Generate Code from UML

HACK

HACK

#81

Generate Code from UML Hack #81

Get a jump start on your coding efforts by using Visio to generate your code.

When Microsoft purchased Visio for its business productivity division in

1999, the company began working on getting it to better integrate with its

Office and Visual Studio product suites. This has lead to advancements in

Visio itself, especially as to the use of UML for designing applications. UML

is an industry standard that allows architects and developers to produce

design documents and diagrams that are commonly understood and used

during the development of an application.

One of the advancements in Visio is the ability to generate code from the

design documents, in particular UML class diagrams that can be used to

generate code for your classes in Visual Studio. Visio can generate the code

in C#, VB, or C++, and you can even create your own templates in Visio for

how you want it to generate your code. For application teams that utilize

design documents, this can be a nice jump start to your coding effort.

This feature is available only in the Visio for Enterprise

Architects version that comes with Visual Studio .NET 2003

Enterprise Architect Edition. No other version of Visio

includes code generation.

A Simple Class Diagram

To have Visio generate code for your classes, you first need to create a UML

class ...