Hi,

I have exactly the same problem. As I undestand Microsoft is planning to make VS as a common tool for everybody who are involved in Software development process, from Project manager to engineer who deploys and maintains solutions. But I don't think it will be happend soon. So I though about a synchronization between SDM and Visio. I prety much sure it will be grate to have such possibiity. I have done a small and necessary step for that, I have a directive processor for SDM, which could be used to do a transformations. But that is all what I have for a now. I hope Microsoft provide some answer here, let's see.

Evgeny

I'm afraid they'll severely limit their market acceptance for enterprise architecture, if they require Visual Studio for the mere viewing of these models... To be sure, there is a healthy .NET presence within my organization, but it is not the only, or even, primary application platform, so people who are not .NET developers (like my network engineers) are not going to be approved to spend money on Visual Studio, just so they can view and/or edit my models.

What's more likely to happen is that I will be told to use some other tool to do my architectural work, and the power of Visual Studio's SDM and DSL tools will be totally lost at my company. I really hope they are more open-minded to playing well in a multi-vendor environment. :)

Thank you, Kenneth and Evgeny. This is valuable feedback. I've forwarded your input to the product team for an answer.

Esther Fan MSFT wrote:

Thank you, Kenneth and Evgeny. This is valuable feedback. I've forwarded your input to the product team for an answer.

Thanks, Esther! I'm looking forward to their response. Since I always have Visual Studio on my machines, it's not such a big deal to me, to use it for diagramming, but it's just not practical to expect everyone who needs to manipulate these diagrams to use Visual Studio.

As I said before, I'd be happy to be able to export to Visio, but even then, I'd be doing a lot of extra work that (in an ideal world) I shouldn't need to do. Some of the diagrams, in my current process, I don't actually create myself, but using Visual Studio I would need to create manually from Visio drawings done by the other teams. Some of the diagrams I normally create, but accept modifications from other teams, so I would be exporting to Visio for collaboration, and then manually updating the Visual Studio diagrams from the returned and edited Visio diagrams. I'm willing to do all that exporting, for the sake of using Visual Studio, but at some point in the future I think you really should support that scenario, too... :)

Ken and Evgeny,

For my purposes, I don't care so much about all the additional metadata as I care about having editable shapes in Visio. Visio is the standard tool, in our organization, that all of our infrastructure diagrams are created in. The Infrastructure Engineers that I need to share my diagams with all have Visio, but almost none of them have Visual Studio.

If the metadata can be exported, too, as additional properties on the shapes, that would be really cool, as I'll be able to give my IE's some macros (in Visio) to expose those properties in any generated documentation from those diagrams, but that's a lower priority for me personally, since it's not my responsibility to maintain that level of detail in the diagrams! (If I were able to provide some macros to generate documentation from the metadata, I would make a lot of friends amongst the IE's to be sure, but all I'm required to deliver to them is the basic Visio diagram!)

As you investigate the possibilities, I would be very willing to provide whatever feedback and assistance you might want. Feel free to contact me, directly, any time.

Thanks,

Ken
kenneth *at* lefebvre.us
ken.lefebvre *at* nationalcity.com

Here's the topic about how to "export" diagrams to other documents by copying all the diagram items:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181801.aspx

No, there really isn't a need to send the Visio shapes back to Visual Studio. I'd say it's about fifty-fifty, the number of diagrams we create in Visual Studio that are actually hooked up to real code. At least half of my Visual Studio diagrams are created in spike solutions that are set up just to create the diagrams. Too many of our development projects are enhancements to existing, legacy code that doesn't lend itself too well to diagramming more than just static class diagrams.

Thanks!

Ken

P.S. I did have a list of other questions/suggestions/issues with Team that I put together some time ago, but I recently moved offices and haven't been able to do the thorough search it'll take to find that list (or else I'll just have to try to remember it and reconstruct it). Once I do, I'll forward it to you... :)