What is the cheapest tool I can buy to allow visual UML design that has code generation abilities bearing in mind it's currently Visual Studio Professional, not Team studio.
I'm trying to achieve the ability of visually creating the namespaces, classes, main paramters and functions in new developments so I can explain show the class layout to my boss, and then send the generated vb.net snubs to the development team to "fill in the blanks".
What about SDE for Visual Studio?
You mention the cost: well this is the downside of Visual Studio. You don't get a lot for free. Resharper costs money. Hell, even Visual SVN costs money (compare that to Java IDEs where it's standard).
The biggest problem I think is that, if I read what you're saying right, you want roundtrip engineering from C# source code? If so, you're going to pay for that. Even in the Java world you pay for that.
I'm not convinced such things actually have all that much value. UML needs to be used selectively to explain key abstractions, concepts and architecture. This is not something a code generator can do. Also for high level class diagrams you rapidly run out of room if you start putting in all the properties and methods.
If you just want to draw some UML diagrams without hte roundtrip engineering I have tried a few of these and JUDE Community was about the best I found of the free ones. I've heard the latest version of ArgoUML doesn't suck either. Just had a quick look and it's certainly a lot better than when I tried it a year or two ago.
So it all comes down to what you're trying to achieve?
Visual Studio 2008 has a built-in class designer. It's not as robust as a full-blown UML tool, but if you're just looking for class diagramming capability with code generation, it works very well. And it costs nothing extra.
Microsoft really lacks UML support for this, though I have some good experience with StarUML, http://staruml.sourceforge.net/en/