Visual Studio 2005 Class Designer

This looks interesting. I've been forced to use Visio for years, and have hated every minute of it. Although it's improved over the last couple of years, Visio has always been a bit clunky and awkward to use, and even suffers from being far too flexible and powerful for its own good. Yet, you get Visio bundled with EA versions of Studio, so you end up using it because you have it, rather than buying another (expensive) piece of software. The main problems with using Visio for UML diagrams have been keeping code and model synchronised, battling with Visio's UML dialogs, and the fact that none of the .net framework types are available for use, so if you want to show that your class inherits from CollectionBase, for example, you wind up having to manually add CollectionBase to your diagram and manually adding the members, or else giving the class a type of object.

The new Class Designer seems to use a "pragmatic UML" notation, which is recognisable to those with UML experience, yet is geared towards .net concepts and constructs, so creating diagrams should be quicker, easier, and more intuitive than with Visio. Also, synchronisation between code and model happens automatically. I think this will encourage people to start designing / modelling their code more (users of MS techs tend to be less structured in their approach). It's possible that, in future versions, MS could include support for patterns and best practises in their designer, as they're doing with the code editor (with the FXCop integration).

The only question remains, where does Visio go now, when the main user base (devs and architects) will start to use vs.net for their diagrams?