The new version of the modeling suite, which includes Together Designer and Together Developer, now offers UML 2.0 support and improved integration with Borland's other application-lifecycle tools.

Borland announced Monday the availability of the latest release of its suite of modeling tools, Together for Visual Studio .Net.

The Scotts Valley, Calif., company announced that Together 2005 for Microsoft Visual Studio .Net now offers UML (Unified Modeling Language) 2.0 support for the Microsoft Corp. development environment.

"We'll be the bridge between the UML world and those companies that want to do DSLs [domain-specific languages]," said Marc Brown, director of product management at Borland Software Corp. "This gives organizations the flexibility to use both modeling paradigms," he said.

"Microsoft is not providing any way to visualize C# and Visual Basic .Net code in UML," Brown said.

Borland officials said the new Together suite acts as a bridge between Microsoft's modeling schemes with DSLs and Software Factories and UML—both UML 1.4 and UML 2.0.

The new Borland suite includes Together Designer and Together Developer for Visual Studio .Net. The products complement Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System.

Click here to read about an open-source alternative to Microsoft's Visual Studio Team System.

Together Developer 2005 for Visual Studio .Net features VB .Net support, C# metrics, UML visualization and the ability to update and modify implementations and leverage design patterns, Borland officials said, while Together Designer 2005 for Visual Studio .Net brings in UML 2.0 support and targets analysts and architects with support for language-neutral modeling.

Together Designer 2005 also features support for OCL (Object Constraint Language) and improved integration with Borland's other application-lifecycle management products, including the CaliberRM requirements management tool, Brown said.

Read Peter Coffee's commentary here on the pros and cons of Visual Studio Tools.

"Model-Driven Architecture, the leading model-driven paradigm, enables software teams to take an application from requirements to code very rapidly and makes it easier to create a visual design that aligns business requirements with the end product," said Richard Soley, chairman and chief executive officer of the Object Management Group, in a statement.

"We see domain-specific tools such as Together for Visual Studio .NET as a great way for organizations to improve the rate of success for their development life-cycle processes," said Prashant Sridharan, lead program manager of Visual Studio 2005 Team System at Microsoft, in a statement. "These tools help organizations take advantage of advanced modeling capabilities and are the first step toward a Software Factory approach to development."

This article was first published on eweek.com.

Discuss Borland Announces Latest Together Suite for VS .Net   >>> Be the FIRST to comment on this article!

>>> More Microsoft and Visual Studios Add Ons Articles          >>> More By Darryl K. Taft