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: 1) by UltraDark on Friday October 21 2016, @08:03PM
From the horses mouth UML Designers have been removed [microsoft.com].
There was a time when Bill Gates was quite a fan of modeling, just before he left MS. Maybe it was around this time UML was put into VS.
UML is slowly being dragged into becoming something programmable by the OMG. Horrendous but programmable. Removing UML might be a mistake in the long term when programming will actually mean modeling.