Visio (the enterprise architect version only) has some general
code-generation capabilities. It's more of a skeleton, though, than anything
else and I think that's because of Visio's history as a "diagramming" tool
and not a "system modeling" tool.
Where Rational XDE kicks ass is with its two-way code synchronization. Write
a class in code, reverse engineer it into a model, make changes to the
model, draw some associations, create some subclasses, you name it... then
go back to your .CS code editor and watch it update. I figured the
round-trip engineering from model-to-class would be a little flakey after
the initial generation, but it's pretty decent. And if you get the "Plus"
version, you can turn on "Visual Trace" -- run your app, enable it, do a few
things, then disable it. Flip back to VS.NET and you've got a trace diagram
that with a couple of clicks becomes a UML sequence diagram.
It's definitely worth checking out a demo. No, I don't work for
Rational/IBM. :)
JD
"Eric Cadwell" <ec******@ns.insight.com> wrote in message
news:ua**************@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
I thought Visio was supposed to handle that. In fact I remember seeing a
demonstration at Dev Days 2 years ago on just that. They were even able to
generate the UML based on input of business rules. Was that all smoke and
mirrors?
-Eric
