#VS15 – No more #UML desginers (And no more UML God Achievement!)

Hi !

It has been more than 6 years since I wrote my first posts about DSLs, Visual Studio extensibility and of course: UML modelers for Visual Studio. In my Visual Studio 2010 book, I also wrote several pages about this and that’s why I remember this with a special affection.

Having said that, also I have to admit that I was never a big fan of these tools. I understand that in certain scenarios are necessary, but as the “documents required rule” I think this is additional work for a development team. The extra work consists of maintaining a coherent version of these diagrams with the reality that reflects the code; if you don´t keep this updated , UML is a big lie.

A few days ago the Visual Studio ALM team announced, the UML Designers will be removed in the next Visual Studio 15 version. And, of course, some people put the cry in the sky. Personally, I think that it is good that they do not include them more, Visual Studio should be left loaded with features extras that have been there for long time.

The only suggestion I have  is to not kill the product at all. Maybe release the code at GitHub and leave the community and people who use it to maintain this feature (the user community exists and there are many developers using this feature) .

Time will tell if it makes sense or not to proceed with UML, while both let the community that maintains these extensions is a good way to help people can migrate to VS15.

The saddest thing of all is that now already no one can keep winning achievements of Visual Studio Achievements… and if one of the achievements was UML GOD:

Create a UML Class Diagram 10 times. Code is for sissies. Models! Models! Models! Learn more about UML in Visual Studio.

Visual Studio Achievements… ahhh those times!

Greetings @ Toronto

El Bruno

References

• Microsoft ALM Blog,
  UML Designers have been removed; Layer Designer now supports live architectural analysis
• Channel 9, UML God Achievement
• El Bruno, Visual Studio Achievements, algunos logros dan miedo !!!
• Amazon, Visual Studio 2010, .Net 4.0 y ALM