Visual Studio Team System 2010 BETA-1: tentative Architecture Excursions

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Clipart Illustration of a White Character Lying On His Belly And Using A Laptop I have probably been one of the greatest critics of VSTS Team Architect 2005 & 2008, but when I see what has emerged with VSTS 2010 BETA-1, I need to give Cameron and his team a “hug”, because the new architect edition ‘rocks’. While there are obviously still some features missing … UML Deployment diagram is one I get asked for all the time … the new look & feel and the feature set of the architecture features tempts me not to join my boys for a cycle tour, a walk and a game of Company of heroes, but instead explore the walkthroughs at our disposal.
image … make sure your peruse this site!

Why am I so excited? Well, while waiting for the next VSTS Rangers BETA-1 VM to complete RAR’ing, I did the following:

Fire up VSTS Team Suite … took a while, but then I am running in a VM, busy RAR’ing 20GB of stuff and defragmenting my drives on my faithful and continuously chugging Windows 2008 server. image
The look & feel of Visual Studio makes you go “aaaaaa…” image
Create a new project and select the modelling project type. image
Add a new artefact and select Sequence diagram. image
Create three simple timelines and messages. image
Right click on the lifelines and the methods and select create class and method respectively. image
  • Add new artefact to project, selecting logical class diagram.
  • Go to UML Model Explorer and drag the classes onto the logical class diagram.
  • Voila …
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Sounds trivial, but dust off VSTS 2005, VSTS 2008, and even Visio and check how long it takes you to get the same quality. A really cool feature, is that we can wire-up these diagrams to work items.

More about the architecture features as we finalise the reverse engineering of a solution as part of one of the VSTS Rangers projects. Watch the space, once the dust settles…