[Tutorial] UML with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2

As an Architect you get to use UML quite often in your daily work. A good diagram can say much more than text and – if well done - is easy understandable and shareable amongst team members and the management.

Microsoft announced some time ago that it endorses UML and that it set a core focus on modeling. It therefore announced its membership in the standards body Object Management Group™ (OMG™).



The next version of Visual Studio will include a quite sophisticated set of tools and features for UML Modeling and its associated Code Generation.

I recently installed Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2 in a Hyper-V Virtual Machine to test these new UML features. The following steps are necessary to use them.

• Create a new project of type “Modeling Project”

• This will create the basic structure for the UML Models

• There are 7 diagram choices currently possible in the Beta 2 release, Add a “UML Class Diagram”

• The Toolbox is now filled with elements that are useful for the creation of classes and class relationships

• Add some elements and design your classes

• Add a “UML Sequence Diagram”, the Toolbox is now filled with elements that are useful for the creation of interactions

• Add some elements and design your interactions

• Add a “UML Use Case Diagram”, the Toolbox is now filled with elements that are useful for the creation of use cases

• Add some elements and design your use cases (note that it is not possible to declare extension points in the Beta 2 release at the moment)

• Add a “UML Activity Diagram”, the Toolbox is now filled with elements that are useful for the creation of actions

• Add some elements and design your actions (note that there are sometimes little display problems, especially when using decision nodes and input pins)

• Add a “UML Component Diagram”, the Toolbox is now filled with elements that are useful for the creation of components and component relationships

• Add some elements and design your components (note that Delegations and Part Assemblies don’t work in the Beta 2 release)

• The “Layer Diagram” and “Directed Graph Document” are no UML Diagrams, so I won’t discuss them in this article

• You can use the new UML Model Explorer to see all elements for all diagrams in one place

[Tutorial] UML with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2