Product support - not supported

I was looking for information, or rather details, on Visual Studio 2010. Looking at the Microsoft website, information is everywhere, but details are hard to find. It's bad enough that Microsoft changes the names of the editions with each release, but trying to find out what is in each edition, and what the differences are from one edition to another is very difficult.

I have recently been on something of a quest, to champion the use of UML. Without tools, UML is just a bunch of boxes and lines that simply makes working with Visio that much more painful. I know that in the past, Microsoft has kept UML at an arms length. They have told me personally that they use it all the time when whiteboarding, but when it comes to implementing a design notation in their tools, they want to use their own standard. I can appreciate that because it does give them the flexibility to build development tools the way they want, without tying them to a set of rules defined by some external organization. While that works just fine if you live solely within the Microsoft ecosystem, communicating architecture and design to someone or some tool outside of that ecosystem is inefficient at best.

I was more than a little surprised when I saw that Visual Studio 2010 had some support for UML. That sounds good, but if it is going to mean anything, I need to know the details. There were a number of questions I had to ask to determine if their use of UML was worthwhile or if it was just marketing. I needed answers to the following questions:

1. What version of UML is supported?
2. Specifically which UML diagrams are included?
3. Is forward and reverse engineering possible?
4. What file format are the UML diagrams saved in?

The reason for the first question is simple - to see if they are keeping up with changes in the UML specification. The second question is to understand if they support the half-dozen key diagrams, or if all you get is a class diagram. The third question is critical - if all you get is static pictures, that is only addressing half of the problem. Are they serious about MDA or not? The fourth question is to see if they save the model information as XMI, or if they are keeping to their own proprietary format, as they did in the past with project files being XML, but the solution files being a Microsoft-specific hybrid XML-like file.

There were a few other questions, but those were the main ones. While browsing the Visual Studio 2010 product pages, a window appeared for product support. It said that if I had questions, I could chat with a person to get the answers. I thought, "Great!" that's just what I need. So I pasted my questions in the chat window and waited for a reply. After a couple minutes, the person essentially stated that he could not answer technical questions, but he could still help me choose which product was right for me. Well, if he can't answer these few "technical" questions, I'm not going to buy any edition - I need to know what I'm getting. I asked if he could put me in touch with someone who could answer my questions. He said he could, but first he'd need some info from me. First it was standard info, like name, and company. He then asked for company address. I'm thinking that, ok, maybe he's trying to locate the rep for my area. I provided the info. Next he asked for what industry I was in, and how many employees were in my company, and how many licenses I needed. Ok, how is ANY of that going to help anyone answer any of my questions. I ended my chat after that.

I then did what I probably should have done in the first place - I resorted to searching the web for blogs from people that had actually used the tool. I soon found most of the answers I was looking for.

1. I did find out that version 2.1.2 is what they use (good - that's the current stable version of UML).
2. The diagrams included are: Class, Activity, Sequence, Use Case, and Component (good, because those are the most commonly used in development)
3. From what I can tell, there is forward and reverse engineering features, though I'm not sure how extensive this is.
4. Not sure if XMI is available, but it sounds like that is what the plan is.

The moral of the story: if you want to find out who can sell you a Microsoft product, ask Microsoft. If you want to find out what's in the product, ask someone else.