visio for enterprise architects

Microsoft has now posted an official statement on VEA - in the form of a
PowerPoint deck explaining what VEA is, what it ships with or doesn't ship
with and what options exist for working with similar functionality.

http://www.visiotoolbox.com/downloads/MSFT_VEA_.ppt

I'm trying to distill this down into a concise article for the blog, but I
can summarize a couple points:

- Visual Studio 2008 does not include any version of VEA
- The most recent version of VEA (shipping in Visual Studio 2005) is based
on the Visio 2003 product
- There is not a comparable VEA version for the Visio 2007 product
- The essential parts of VEA that do not exist in Visio 2007 are forward
engineering of databases and code generation from UML

Visual Studio 2008 still has capabilities in this space around database and
software modeling, so Microsoft is by no means getting out of the market.
The statement here is that VEA is not the tool at this time. The slide deck
provides factual information, but does not discuss on the rationale for the
changes.

--
Mark Nelson
Office Graphics - Visio
Microsoft Corporation

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

"Allen" <Allen DeleteThis @discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:EA60D461-35E5-42BE-848D-9B64D3AB4FF5@microsoft.com...
> Then what product will Microsoft be offieing in VS 2008 to reverse
> engineer,
> edit, and then generate Databases?
>
> Should we assume that Microsoft is getting out if the Database Schema
> Modeling market?
>
> "Barb Way" wrote:
>
>> I have not found a public link on this yet, will post here as soon as I
>> do.
>> There is no firm update on what *will* happen to the solutions, but
>> there
>> is Not going to be a new version of VEA in the next release of Visual
>> Studio - that is a fact.
>>
>> Barb Way
>> Product Support - Visio
>> Microsoft Corporation
>> This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no
>> rights

I too, have been surprised by the dropping of the DDL generation, error
checking, and schema synchronization functionality.

As I have experienced, Visio 2002 Enterprise Architect is not compatible
with SQL Server 2005. I upgraded to Visio 2007 Professional, only to be
disappointed and surprised that this central functionality has been
inexplicably dropped.

It was difficult for me to find out, but searching the internet it seems
that Visio for Enterprise Architects in the current MSDN subscription
supports this crucial feature.

Would this version of Visio support SQL Server 2008?

There are few lower cost alternatives these days, and it is hard to find a
DB tool that integrates smoothly w/ the latest editions of MS SQL server.
Thus there is more pressure to go the route of DBDesigner 4/MySQL when
starting projects with complex database needs. Which is unfortunate, since
Microsoft SQL Server is a great product series. (It's an MS product that I
actually praise, among my open source LAMP developer colleagues.)

MS Sql Server, IMO, is in fact a central foundation of data centric
development using MS technologies. There should be some guidance, somewhere,
as to how to continue to design complex databases for MS Sql Server into the
future. Directing us to rely on the Database Diagram feature of SQL Server
is not a good fit, because of the need to prototype, print out, share vsd's,
and to visually think out different changes to existing DB's, and then to
create the DDL to migrate synchronization scripts on production servers.
Visio has also been an appropriate tool for DB architecture because of good
print features, and the ability to add annotations and other shapes.