OT: Drawing class diagrams. What tool to use?

tetranz posted on Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Happy new year everyone. Sorry for the off topic post but I can't be the only one here to struggle with this.

I'm basically the one person internal development department where I work. I have developed several successful CSLA based WinForms apps which are in daily use. The documentation is, well ... lets say not as great as it could be.

I want to draw some simple class diagrams much like the diagrams in Rocky's books to primarily show the relationships between classes. Yes, this probably should have been done first but ... that's where I'm at now. I feel like I'm bashing my head on a wall whenever I try to find a simple tool to do this. The class diagram in Visual Studio 2008 looks promising. I can drag, say, a CustomerList (ROL) and a CustomerInfo (ROC) class. That looks good but there doesn't seem to be a way of showing the "contains" type relationship. I can draw an association between them but then it tries to add a CustomerInfo property to CustomerList. I really don't want it messing with my code.

People say to use Visio and I have Visio 2003 but I get lost with that too. Can anyone point me to a tutorial or something for using Visio for simple class diagrams?  Any other suggestions?

I feel like a bit of an old fogie here because for this project I feel like all I really need is the ability to draw boxes, lines and arrows with something smart enough to keep the connections together when I move something.

Thanks
Ross

ajj3085 replied on Tuesday, January 05, 2010

The contains relationship would be between the type that has a CustomerList and the CustomerInfo.  So you'd need three types to show.  I think you can specify that it should be a "collection association" and that will diagram it correctly.

I don't think there's any way to show that CustomerList holds objects of type CustomerInfo in the diagram though, short of looking at the generic parameters.