Steve Cook's WebLog : Architecture Edition

The Oslo team are implementing UML 2

Steve Cook — Thu, 28 May 2009 13:23:00 GMT

Keith Short has announced that the next Oslo CTP will include support for loading UML models into the Oslo repository. I've been helping Keith and his team to unravel some of the complexities of the UML specification. As Keith says, in due course we plan to be able to store UML models created using the Architecture Edition UML tools in the Oslo repository.

VS 2010 DSL SDK Beta1

Steve Cook — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:16:00 GMT

Following close on the heels of VS2010 Beta1, we've announced the corresponding DSL SDK (oh those acronyms) - see Jean-Marc's blog.

Ages of silence

Steve Cook — Thu, 21 May 2009 12:53:00 GMT

I see I haven't written anything here since February. I've been very busy on two main fronts - lots of work on getting Team Architect ready for Beta 1 of Visual Studio Team System 2010, as well lots of work on making changes to the Components part of the forthcoming UML 2.3 specification.

Well, Beta 1 is out now. We use Visual Studio to build itself (we call it "dogfooding", a typically Microsoftian neologism), and one of the things that sometimes slows us down is performance. Rico Mariani always has interesting things to say about this, including now.

I'll write some details about the UML Component changes over the next few weeks.

Alan is blogging again

Steve Cook — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 14:49:00 GMT

Alan Cameron Wills has started blogging about UML for Agile Development. This should be interesting.

Explicit Design

Steve Cook — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 18:26:00 GMT

Cameron has been blogging about new features in our product.. In a recent post he used the term Explicit Design. I've been reflecting on this, and I like it. In software development we really do need to capture design data that is not just the code, but should be saved and versioned just like the code. What do we call it? We could call it "models" but "model" and "model driven development" are subject to so much historical baggage and methodology and terminology arguments. "Model" just seems to imply baked-in code generation and round tripping, when there is so much more that you can do with it: planning, verifying, testing, refactoring. We need new vocabulary that represents our ability to capture versioned design data at a more abstract level than the code without simultaneously implying the history of CASE.

Architecture Edition Videos

Steve Cook — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 15:36:00 GMT

If you want more details about the tools we're building, Cameron Skinner gives an overview of the next version of Team System Architecture Edition. Mark Groves explains and demos the logical part of the story in Top-Down Design, and Suhail Dutta explains and demos the physical part of the story with Bottom-Up Design. All are to be found on Brian Keller's Visual Studio Team System 2010 week on Channel 9.