It’s been some time since we updated this blog, so to bring things up to date, we released the visualization and modeling tools for Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate in April. These tools make it easier to develop software that meets its users' needs by helping you perform the following tasks:

• Understand existing code, its relationships, and its behavior through the use of Architecture Explorer, dependency graphs, layer diagrams, and sequence diagrams.
• Clarify users' needs with UML models: use case, activity, sequence, and class.
• Define software architecture with layer diagrams and UML models: component, class, and sequence.
• Generate or configure parts of the application from UML models or domain-specific languages (DSL).
• Make sure that code remains aligned with the design by running layer validation.
  
• Plan work and track progress by linking model elements to work items in Team Foundation Server.
  
• Customize models and diagrams by using the modeling extensibility capabilities.

If you have Visual Studio 2010 Premium, you can open models and diagrams created with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and run layer validation against code. Building on this, we also released the Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack in June to support the following tasks in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate:

• Generate code from UML class diagrams.
• Create UML class diagrams from code.
• Import UML class, sequence, and use case elements from XMI 2.1 files.
• Create and view links from work items to model elements.
• Generate dependency graphs for ASP.NET Web, C, and C++ projects.
• Create and validate layer diagrams for C and C++ code.
• Write custom code to create, modify, and validate layer diagrams.

To download a trial version of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and the feature pack, see Visual Studio Downloads and Visual Studio 2010 Feature Packs. For more information, you can find the visualization and modeling documentation here and the feature pack documentation here. We'd love to hear your questions and feedback in the forums.

You can also check out Cameron Skinner's interview about the code visualization tools:

Format: wmv
Duration: 12 minutes, 30 seconds