Introducing the Visual Designers—What about UML?

Microsoft .NET Framework, ASP.NET, Visual C# (CSharp, C Sharp, C-Sharp) Developer Training, Visual Studio

What about UML?

As a professional software designer, chances are good that you have at least a passing acquaintance with UML. If so, you might want to know the following: How can you capitalize on your investment in UML skills when adopting the new tools? How can you capitalize on your investment in UML artifacts? What if you really want a fully integrated UML capability?

We’ll attempt to answer those questions, but first a few words about Microsoft’s position regarding UML.

According to the published modeling strategy, Microsoft is not against UML as such. They see UML as a valuable notation for sketching out ideas early in the software life cycle, a task for which you can continue to use Visio in the retained role that we discuss shortly. They also support third-party vendors, some of whom are building UML 2.0 tools for Visual Studio 2005. In addition, where it makes sense to do so, the new set of visual designers will use UML-like notations to ease the transition.

However, Microsoft believes that it can better bridge the gap between design and development (modeling and coding) by providing a set of visual designers—underpinned by DSLs—that enable you to work at a high level of abstraction while providing sufficiently high fidelity for the specific domain being modeled. In this respect, using stereotypes and other mechanisms to extend UML 2.0 would have been overly complex and still too generic.