Visually Model Software Applications
Note: Some features may not be offered in the publicly available Visual Studio.NET Beta 2.
Customers building complex distributed applications face the challenge of successfully communicating application architecture and requirements across a broad range of team members. This challenge compounds as we move into the world of loosely coupled XML Web services. It is common knowledge that the presentation of concepts and information in multiple formats—visual, spoken, written—enhances people's ability to understand messages quickly and accurately. Taking this multiple-format approach to communicating, Visual Studio.NET helps foster team coordination and productivity by providing a rich set of visual modeling tools for specifying application architecture and requirements.
An Industry-Standard Approach
Visual Studio.NET delivers support for a full range of design and modeling activities, including freeform diagramming capabilities as well as a set of industry-standard Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams. UML is a notation for visually describing and interpreting the pieces, relationships, and actions that comprise a software application.
With the Visual Studio.NET modeling features, users can create sophisticated diagrams to specify their application architecture and business requirements, and can communicate these across their teams. Business analysts, architects, developers—and others who want to perform analysis and design tasks to enhance communication and increase the productivity of their development teams—can take advantage of these new capabilities. The following scenario demonstrates how the structure of a particular software system can be visualized and more effectively communicated by using software models created in Visual Studio.NET.
Application Scenario: A Car Rental Software System
This scenario discusses how the eight UML diagram types might be used to model a car rental agency's software system. Beginning with three simple use cases, the examples capture the core processes in the system.
