VS.NET Application Diagrams

Question

Have you used VS.NET Architect Edition's Application and System diagrams to start designing a solution?

If so, did you find it useful? Did the "automatic implementation" feature worked ok?

Answer 1

Yes, and no, it's not very useful in my opinion. It's not very stable, it's easy to get out of sync, and the "look how fast I generate this" advantage is virtually nil when compared to more mundane things such as code snippets.

Then again, I am a total "Architect" luddite, so take this with a grain of salt.

Answer 2

I used to use it a lot. This designer worked good for stubbing out prototype projects, but ultimately I found myself wasting a lot of time moving the mouse around when I could be typing. It seemed like an awesome idea to be able to print out the class diagrams to show APIs to other developers while I was prototyping, but it proved quite limiting and it looks awful on a non-color printer.

Now I just use the text editor and some AutoHotkey macros to get everything done.

Answer 3

I agree with Stu, and I don't consider myself an Architect luddite :-). Kind of like a lot of MS frameworks over the years, you are tied to their particular way of thinking, which doesn't always gel with the ideas that come out of the rest of the architecture community at large. Generating stubs, in my opinion, doesn't really add that much value, and the round trip half of the equation has messed up some of my project files and made me have to re-write the things manually.