Visual Studio 2010: How to generate component diagram from code

Question

I got into a project that is under development for quite sometime and lacks models and documentation on the design. We are using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate. There is one old preliminary VS architecture model and I am trying to grow it up to show how the system looks like from different perspectives.

While, I can generate the class diagrams fairly well and generate the sequence diagrams on the fly, I am stuck in generating the component diagram. I wanted to avoid the pain of generating it of my own and wished if there could be some easy process to reflect the code/implementation to a good extent. Fine-tuning is not an issue.

I expected, I could put the assemblies in the solution as components in the Model explorer. But could not. I also tried drag-and-dropping the projects to the component diagram or the namespaces/classes from the architecture explorer on to the component diagram.

Is there any easy way out?

Answer 1

You will need to download and install the Visual Studio SDK and the Visual Studio Visualization and Modeling SDK then create a Domain-Specific Language Solution.

• MSDN for VS 2008 DSL
• MSDN for VS 2010 DSL (differs quite a bit, therefore both links)
• Visual Studio Development Center - DSL

Unfortunately that is pretty much all Information I could gather, as I cannot install the VS 2010 SDK even though I do have VS 2010 Professional installed. If you happen to not be able to install it yourself here is a link to a post in the Microsoft forum of someone having the same problem atm. It is still unresolved, but was just asked a little while ago.

Edit: For creating UML component diagrams with VS2010 one will need VS2010 Ultimate. I am not quite sure weather you need it to actually install the Modeling SDK also. I dont feel a need to test it on my Professional installation though and you do have Ultimate anyway.