Visual Studio Adds Modeling, Architecture Tools

Visual Studio 2010 adds tools to model and design applications. These tools can help team members understand an application’s design more quickly, simplifying code maintenance and reusability while enabling more team members to share development tasks. However, the new capabilities place pressure on ISVs who offer similar functionality.

The features related to architecture and modeling mentioned in this chapter require VS 2010 Ultimate, although the Premium edition supports read-only views of models and diagrams produced with Ultimate, so that all team members understand the project’s design goals.

Application Life-Cycle Management Evolved

VS enables application life-cycle management: collaboration among developers, testers, architects, and project managers who are designing, coding, testing, deploying, and maintaining applications. VS supports source code control, software project management, software build management, testing, and other group development tasks with a central collaboration server and database called Team Foundation Server (TFS). TFS also provides Office- and Web-based reporting and review of software projects for managers and other stakeholders.