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from the how-did-they-model-the-removal? dept.
Microsoft has decided to drop the UML (Unified Modeling Language) designer tools from Visual Studio 15, reports Paul Krill at IT World. MS sales and support teams confirmed that few customers were actually using the feature.
"Removing a feature is always a hard decision, but we want to ensure that our resources are invested in features that deliver the most customer value," said Microsoft's Jean-Marc Prieur, senior program manager for Visual Studio.
I've almost never had occasion to use UML professionally other than a few hand drawn designs on scrap paper that were thrown away. I did have a coworker who had a tool that generated UML from code that was sometimes helpful when he explained his work in review sessions. In school UML appeared to be a nightmare that was used for modelling everything but software, yet academics talked about UML one day becoming executable and replacing code.
Do you use UML? Are you going to miss this feature in Visual Studio?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by lgw on Thursday October 20 2016, @11:15PM
All of my design diagrams are UML. But they're hand drawn, or drawn using the excellent UMLet tool, and simplified to the important stuff worth presenting. Auto-generated UML is too cluttered to have any use.
I find the basic "language" of UML class diagrams to be clear, and I need some standard for showing "owns" vs "knows about" etc. Instances that have their own threads vs not is also good to see.
But cluttering up the diagram trying to show everything makes it useless. UML gets worse the more of its conventions you have to memorize. Trying to actually code in UML would be a nightmare.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday October 21 2016, @03:43AM
UML is a lot more than basic class diagrams you learn in babby's first programming class. As examples,
this, [tracemodeler.com]
this, [sourcemaking.com]
this, [conceptdraw.com]
and this, [gliffy.com]
...to name a few.
Which supports my claim above that modern software engineering is more brochure design rather than actual coding, if the university curricula are any indicator.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rich on Friday October 21 2016, @12:47PM
That first model exemplifies everything that is wrong with UML.
A video cassette whose responsibility is cranking out the "is rentable to this customer" business rule and asking the customer: "Are you adult?".
Well. In the IoT, maybe. :)
But when this was all the rage 15 years ago, clueless middle managers would leave meeting rooms after a day of staring at these diagrams, entirely convinced that it takes a brain as big as theirs for software development. Each and every bit of stupidity can be well covered up with such procedure. More so than COBOL, made to be readable by management, a generation before.
With automated tools going away, maybe UML starts to be less sucky, because after all it has the means to allow us to scribble class relations, data relations and program flow in a somewhat coherent notation. (Though I'd only ever use those "racetracks" for truly concurrent entities).
(Score: 2) by lgw on Monday October 24 2016, @09:20PM
Sure, but "more than basic class diagrams" is the same as "too much UML". Still a nice tool for basic class diagrams, though.