Chapter 21. Modeling | Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Unleashed

IN THIS CHAPTER

Team Architect Artifacts
Designing Your Application
Defining a System
Defining Your Infrastructure
Deploying Your Application
Implementing Your Application
Visually Developing Code

Software modeling is moving out of the documentation phase and becoming a core development task. All too often software is modeled during initial design when expectations are high and intentions are great. However, as the project progresses, it can become difficult to keep the models updated. When the code base starts diverging from the models, this documentation can be quickly rendered useless.

Visual Studio 2005 is Microsoft's first step at moving software modeling out of this documentation mode and into the IDE. Having the models in the IDE means they are closer to the code and systems you write. This helps ensure these models are useful to the development process and the team. It also provides a better chance that they stay in sync with the project.

In this chapter, we focus on the models and related tools used to develop software with Visual Studio 2005. These models include the following diagrams:

Application The application diagram is used to define the components that make up your application.
System The system diagram is used to group applications into systems for deployment purposes.
Class The class diagram is used to visualize code and make changes to its structure.
Logical Datacenter The logical datacenter diagram is used to define the infrastructure that will house your application.
Deployment The deployment diagram represents the logical deployment of your systems into the datacenter.

Each of these diagrams has an associated set of tools or a designer that can be used to create and edit the diagrams. We cover each of these diagrams and their related tools through the rest of this chapter.

Note

The majority of what we discuss in this chapter is related to the Visual Studio 2005 Team Architect product. The only exception is the Class Designer. This tool is available to all team members with Visual Studio Professional or a Team Edition.