Would anyone be willing to put together a UML diagram of a sample project (say Northwind) in using both the Adapter and the Self Servicing templates?

This would help us tremendously with trying to understand the architecture of the generated code!

If you have visio, you can reverse engineer the code into UML (uml in visio is horrible, but for diagram viewing it's ok)

I did try Visio but all it did was create the classes (and one for every other type referenced in the project ). I was not able to put it in a decent layout. Oh well, it's not really a big deal. Thanks for the idea.

Download the demo of Flywheel, found at http://www.velocitis.com

Otis wrote:

If you have visio, you can reverse engineer the code into UML (uml in visio is horrible, but for diagram viewing it's ok)

I've just started using Visio as a UML modelling tool so I'm interested to know why you think it's horrible. From what I've seen, it's somewhat buggy, lacks advanced code generation (as well as having only a very limited set of target languages) and integration with database modelling, but I haven't seen any major UML design flaws. What would you suggest as an alternative to Visio-please-don't-say-Rational? A bit more on topic, I'm thinking it would be nice if (after LLBL generates DB classes) LLBL could generate some kind of output containing package(class?) structure so that it's usable when modelling, for instance, sequence diagrams. I don't suppose it allready exists...does it? I've just tried to reverse-engineer UML from a LLBL project (~50 table database) and I've ran out of virtual memory when VS.Net broke the 1GB(!) barrier so I'll just have to...try again. But smarter. On a server, preferably.

visio's uml functionality is cumbersome as it doesn't support native .NET types and it has silly dialogs for everything, so working with your model takes a lot of time.

I'm no UML expert so I don't know what UML tool to use best...

I have to agree Visio is far more pain than pleasure, Thanks for the link to FlyWheel, going to give it a spin, we've been looking for something reasonably priced with it's functionality.

John

Just my 2 cents....

I think two produts are outstanding:

Enterprise Architect (http://www.sparxsystems.com.au/) and Borland Together edition for VS.Net. (http://www.borland.com/together/msvs/)

I prefer Together due to its integration to VS and their two-way approach: you can visually design a class and it creates the code for you or you can write your classes and methods and it will layout the class diagram for you, all within VisualStudio. Both are under US$ 300.00 so they are a viable alternative to Visio and more expensive products like Rose.

Both of them are not perfect though....with Borland you have to be careful in what you include in your model because it will keep synchronizing the model so if you include your DAL classes generated with LLBLGEN as well as your own app, it will take a long time to even load a project. There are some tricks to make it work right....but when it does, it's fantastic (if you like Model Driven Approach)

Alfredo

Alfredo wrote:

There are some tricks to make it work right....but when it does, it's fantastic (if you like Model Driven Approach)

I am using this product also, but I really dislike its slowness: Could you perhaps tell me how you've managed to speed it up?

BlueCell wrote:

I am using this product also, but I really dislike its slowness: Could you perhaps tell me how you've managed to speed it up?

When I started using Together I had horrible performance issues. I even upgraded my computer to a P4 2.4 HT and 2GB RAM and the problems continued. The problem was that I was including the VS.NET support for the LLBLGEN generated projects with my own app. The only way I managed to have a decent performance is by disabling the Together support for the LLBLGEN projects and just focusing on my own app. Anyway, you can import classes from the references, so it works Ok. On the other hand, I have enabled Together support for the LLBLGEN generated solution. I hope they would fix this performance issue but seems Borland is not very responsive (at least from what I've seen in the newsgroups).

Hope it helps!

Alfredo

I've looked at Together and Enterprise Architect and am getting pretty close to buying the latter. My reasoning is as follows:

On all these design tools there are two markets: the low-end (maybe 299 max) and the high-end (idiot managers will spend $5000 a person). Vendors hate to miss out on that high-end market. Although Together for VS.NET targets the low-end, there are other editions of Together that target the high-end market. So I think Borland will always be witholding some desirable feature to distinguish their products. These guys in Australia will just keep putting whatever new features they come up with into their product.

That's my two cents.

Well... hopefully the new version coming in Q1 this year (so almost) will erase some of the performance issues. Your solution makes sense, so I'll try that when I have time. I would like to ask you one more thing: some diagrams have many classes (10+) inside it making it very hard to read because you can not see everything in one glance. How do you solve this? Is there a way, that I can have one class per diagram?