Visio and Forward-Engineering

Question

Do you know if I can use Visio to forward-engineer a sequence diagram into code (c#)?

Can it be done with Visio alone or do I need a plugin?

What about other diagrams?

Answer 1

You have to get the Visio that for users of Visual Studio. See this link: Visio for Enterprise Architects for more details. The code generation capabilities are fairly weak and you might end up getting Visio into an inconsistent state. I know that Visio will let you forward and reverse engineer both code and databases, but both capabilities are very limited and I don't recommend doing it.

In my opinion, Visio is a diagramming tool and it should be treated as such.

Answer 2

Looks like the latest version of Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect can forward engineer sequence diagrams

Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect

Answer 3

To the best of my knowledge, Visio can only forward-engineer code from class models.

As sequence diagrams only really show paths of communication between objects, I suspect that they do not contain the necessary information, except perhaps in trivial cases, for generating code.

Objects with any sort of complex behaviour patterns are likely to involve changing run-time states, of which sequence diagrams aren't really capable of capturing.