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: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday October 21 2016, @05:43AM
Nassi-Shniederman diagrams were the fad when I was in school. Problem was, none of our assignments were complicated enough to warrant the use of such tools. They were a waste of time, done only to appease the professor who believed in them. I did it backwards-- write the program first, then draw the NSD for it.
The job in which UML was used was the most dysfunctional workplace I have had the misfortune to experience. Management didn't know jack or care to learn about running a software project. After a year of office politics and zero progress, heck, zero agreement on what to do, not even an acknowledgement between managers that they had to pull together and stop trying to cut each others' throats, the train wreck finally ground to a halt with our employer losing the contract and everyone laid off. UML was just one of many footballs they tried to club each other with.
(Score: 2) by gawdonblue on Friday October 21 2016, @09:36AM
Nasty-Spiderman!