After modeling my project in the UML modeling tool in Visual Studio 2010 Beta, I wanted to generate the code and get on with implementation. Strangely I couldn’t find any way of generating the code in the studio. I got a bit irritated, as Microsoft always have done very well with the usability of their IDE’s in the past. I tried the help, but couldn’t find anything there either.
After searching the web I found a post on MSDN forums, it seems this feature isn’t implemented yet and the post suggests it will be released in the RTM planned for March.
It’s imperative that code generation from the model is implemented well. Regeneration of the plumbing must be implemented so that it won’t overwrite implementation code. Handling of discrepancies between model and plumbing code must be well thought out, as there is always a chance that the model and the plumbing code will get out of sync if any one forgets to check in parts of code in the repository.
I regularly run in to the mess of model and plumbing code being out of sync in other tools and it’s never a pleasant situation, so I have high hopes that the Visual Studio team pulls this off.