Professional UML with Visual Studio .NET [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

by Tony Loton (Author), Kevin McNeish (Author), Andrew Filev (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
If you want to use Visio to create enterprise software, this is the book for you. The integration of Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect and Visio for Enterprise Architects provides a formidable combination. Visio offers powerful diagramming capabilities, including such things as creating UML models, mapping out databases with Entity Relationship diagrams, and aiding the development of distributed systems. Its integration with Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect means that C# or Visual Basic .NET code can be generated from the UML diagrams, and Visual Studio .NET projects can be reverse engineered to UML models. For the developer already familiar with UML and looking to get the best out of Visio, the Visual Studio .NET and Visio for Enterprise Architects combination is weakly documented, and the quality information needed to realize the time-saving features of Visio just doesn't seem to be available, until now. This book presumes that you are already familiar with the basic concepts of UML notation - this book will not teach you UML. Instead, this book will take you forward into the Visio environment, showing you how to make the most of its software-related features. The topics covered in this book include: - Diagramming business components in Visio
- Generating code from a UML model
- Reverse engineering Visual Studio .NET projects into a UML model
- Reverse engineering into a UML model without source code
- Documenting the project with UML and Visio
- Designing distributed applications with Visio's diagrams
- Entity Relationship database modeling, and round-trip engineering for database design

From the Back Cover
If you want to use Visio for Enterprise Architects to quickly design and create enterprise software, this is the book for you.

The integration of Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect and Visio for Enterprise Architects is a formidable combination. Visio offers powerful diagramming capabilities, including such things as creating UML models, mapping out and generating databases, and aiding the development of distributed systems. Visio’s integration with Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect means that C# or Visual Basic® .NET code can be generated from UML diagrams, thus giving your projects a significant kick-start, and Visual Studio .NET projects can also be reverse engineered to UML models.

This book will finally help you make the most of Visio’s time- and labor-saving features, and unleash Visio’s power for your enterprise development.

To use this book you must be comfortable with the basic concepts of UML.

What you will learn from this book

• Diagramming business components in Visio
• Generating code from UML models
• Reverse engineering Visual Studio .NET projects into UML models, with or without source code
• Documenting projects with UML and Visio
• Designing distributed applications with Visio diagrams
• Using Object-Role Modeling and round-trip engineering for database design

"This book will definitely help any developer wishing to get a jump-start on using Visio for Enterprise Architects in their traditional development process. The book meshes traditional UML knowledge with .NET development model specifics, resulting in a deep understanding of how Visio for Enterprise Architects can speed up software design and development time."
—Andrew Krowczyk, Senior Software Developer, Zurich North America --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Wrox Press; 1st edition (December 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1861007957
• ISBN-13: 978-1861007957
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,150,500 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars You're in for much confusion, December 25, 2003

By	Milan Negovan (NY, United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Professional UML with Visual Studio .NET (Paperback)

In the best... excuse me---worst tradition of WROX this book is yet another example of incoherent fragments and inconsistent writing. The reason I broke my rule and bought a WROX book is because there's hardly any (if any at all) decent documentation on Visio and it's *real-world* applications by and for developers. No, this book is not a complete waste of money, but it could be a thousand times better. Read on.

The funnies thing about this book is that right from the outset one of the authors promises that the book would cover *one* and only one real-world solution as opposed to other books who feed you different examples all the time. I read this book from cover to cover and yet... every chapter laid out a different example! ? Note to authors: can you guys at least talk to each other? Let along sync up content.

As far as editing goes... Was there editing done at all? You'll see a number of annoying typos and strange grammatical errors. I also found errors in a few diagrams which is worse than typos.

Chapter 1 starts off with a brief introduction and overview of UML and its basic concepts. It's neither comprehensive or clear enough for beginners, nor is it useful for those who are not new to UML.

Chapter 2 is a nice "tour of Visio" even though they messed up a couple of diagrams so don't count on their accuracy. Very much for beginners.

Chapter 3, "Diagramming Business Objects" is worth the money you paid for this book.

Chapter 6, "Documenting the Project" is totally out of place. It goes back to the basic UML diagram, and whoever wrote this chapter, drew the diagrams in a pretty unorthodox way. A bizarre chapter to say the least.

Chapter 8 is another reason you might want to own a copy of this book. It presents a short yet informative introduction to ORM, creating a database from a model and reverse engineering an existing one.

To sum it up, two stars for the effort and *some* useful content. To those who wrote Chapters 3 and 8 thank you. Other than that---a very sloppy job by WROX yet once again. Not worth the money at all. Get it from bookpook.com for much less or download for free from Usenet.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well worth the time..., December 23, 2002

By	Andrew Krowczyk (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

I don't know about you, but as a developer I've always wanted a book that covered the Visio modeling tool in a way that would help me be more productive in my work. With .NET and the release of the Visio for Enterprise Architects edition this desire for a comprehensive book covering Visio's use and *fit* within the .NET Enterprise Development suite has never been greater. I think Wrox has hit the nail on the head with the book offering, and believe that it will greatly help any developers looking to get an edge in developing with Visio & .NET. I know that it's been of great use to me in my development projects!

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Did the authors of this book communicate with each other??, September 21, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Professional UML with Visual Studio .NET (Paperback)

The book starts out ok, and at first you are told that the examples in this book will all be related to the same business so that the reader can understand the progression. The author also boasts that this book unlike most others will use references to the same business model for the entire book. Yeah Right!! Then the next chapter, most likely written by a different author starts using a completely different business model for his examples. Every other chapter continues to change the business model in order to present the subject matter. Not only is this very confusing, but sometimes the authors refer to parts of the book that don't even exist. Its like parts of the book were accidentally left out. Arrrrr!!! Then to top it all off there are tons of spelling and grammatical errors that could have been caught by simple proofreading. The solution to this problem, and I hope someone at Wrox is reading, is to not have more then one author write the book. Wrox does this all the time with their books. That's why most of their books suck! I should have learned my lesson the last time I read a Wrox book, but the only reason I bought this one is because there is nothing else available on the subject matter. And can you believe that they have a cover price of $59.99 for this garbage. I am never buying another Wrox book again.