Professional UML with Visual Studio. NET. Unmasking Visio for Enterprise Architects

This book focuses on using Visio to support the software development process. Throughout the book, you'll find examples of using Visio to diagram various aspects of software and software designs. In most cases, those diagrams will be built using the UML. Since Visio is central to the material covered in the following chapters it makes sense to take an early look at the features and capabilities of the product and point out various aspects of Visio that aid software development. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to illustrate Visio as a software-diagramming tool and to provide examples of how developers can use Visio help design and document their applications.

Visio Background

Fundamentally, Visio is a diagramming package. When most business software users hear the name Visio, they think flowcharts. That's certainly understandable - Visio cut its teeth as a product building business flowcharts and similar diagrams. The makers of Visio smartly expanded the basic flowcharting capabilities of the application by addressing specific industries or domains and, in particular, common charting or diagramming tasks occurring within those industries. For instance, Visio can create a diagram of an entire web site by tracing hyperlinks from one page to another when given a starting page. Visio can also generate a database diagram from existing database tables. Visio also has built-in support for generating organizational hierarchy charts and building plans like space layout diagrams. Visio even supports automation, giving COM developers the ability to include diagramming and flowcharting capabilities within their applications.

The point is this - Visio is a powerful application that has found many uses in a variety of places. As developers we can benefit from the functionality others already enjoy. In addition to support for UML diagrams, Visio also supports building a variety of other software-oriented diagrams including Windows User Interface diagrams, COM and OLE diagrams, and Data Flow Diagrams.

Before we delve into detailed software diagrams let's look at some basic Visio operations - how to create and manipulate simple diagrams and work with some common Visio functions. After that, we'll examine some of the more technical, software development-oriented Visio tools.