Jennifer Marsman (Microsoft Evangelist) and Cameron Skinner (Microsoft Visual Studio Product Unit Manager) recently stopped by our office while they were passing through Louisville on their tour to give us a presentation on the new Visual Studio 2010 Modeling and Architecture Tools.

I checked out these new features when Visual Studio 2010 Beta versions originally rolled out and have been really impressed with this stuff ever since then. So it was pretty cool to actually learn some new techniques from Cameron himself since he helped write the actual code behind some of those features. If you've upgraded to Visual Studio 2010 recently I would highly recommend using the Architecture tools. They're awesome. If you want to make improvements to it, they even have their own SDK for it. There are plenty of blogs out there to show you how to use it. I've been waiting to find a tool that works like this where I can really analyze the code in solutions and projects and see how everything ties together.

It's really handy if you're asked to work on a new project and aren't familiar with how it works. Just run the tools, analyze the DLL's, learn how everything works, and then you'll be ready to implement new code! It's a great tool to learn new systems quick and easy and it's all housed within the Visual Studio IDE. I just wanted to write a blog to brag about it a little bit, so I figured I'd throw this up here. It's a must have tool for Developers/Architects. Here's some screenshots of when I was using it earlier:

Thanks everyone!

- Mike