xenub
Junior Member
Registered: Aug 2001
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Posts: 5 |
Visio 2002 w/VS.NET Ent. Architect
I used Visio2002 w/VS.NET Ent. Architect to generate code from UML and reverse engineer code to UML.
First, Visio 2002 is a lot more stable then version 2000. This alone, makes a big difference. 2002 is rock solid!
The code generation feature works well. The code generation options (right click on a class, go into properties, then select 'Code Generation Options') let you create generation templates which you can reuse, so it's easy to customize, easy to reuse the customization on different element, and you can specify a generation template on any element so you have a fine grained control over the whole code generation process.
When you generate code from Visio, Visio does not update the Visual Studio Project with the new code, it creates a new Visual Studio Project and put the code skeleton in it. Same thing when reverse engineering code into a UML model. Visio won't update a model from code, it can only creates a new UML poject.
What is generated when you reverse engineer code is the model's 'skeleton' that you see in the Model Explorer. Reverse engineering code alone doesn't generate any diagrams at all.
So the reverse engineering/code generation features are useful as long as you don't need (as I do) real Round-Trip Engineering, in which case, Rational XDE is a lot better. Also, ironically, XDE is really well integrated into VS.NET. With Visio, you have to go back and forth between the two applications which makes it harder on this so fragile creative workflow!! 
xenub
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