Adding UML to Visual Studio 2010 Premium?

Question

I would like to add a UML tool to my Visual Studio 2010 Premium. It looks like it might be an Ultimate only thing as stated here -> Does Visual Studio 2010 Professional support UML modeling? . I'm not finding anything adding UML support to Premium.

If it true that it is an Ultimate only thing, what UML tools are people using outside of Visual Studio?

I'm new to UML and trying to figure out how to do my designs better with less revisions.

Answer 1

StarUML is one of the better UML diagram tools out there and it is free. If you do a diligent enough job with the design, it'll even auto-generate headers and source skeletons.

Answer 2

Have a look at these:

• Enterprise Architect
• Magic Draw - I have used this and it is very good and does alot. Can be daunting so maybe overkill if you are just getting going with UML.

Both of these require licenses. I am not aware of any decent free UML tools. But then I am not an authority on UML tools!

Edit:

Just remembered that Altova also have a UML tool - I have not used this. However, I have used their XSD suite and can verify that their software quality is very good, so the UML tool may also be good.

Answer 3

I have Ultimate edition and also acess to Sparx EA but my tool of choice is Visio with these excellent free UML stencils . The advantage of Visio is it allows to use many shapes (non - UML) in the same diagram and it is free with MSDN. I am not an UML purist and doesn't require all bells and whistles for my diagrams.

An architect I once met used Agilian which seems to be a capable tool as well.