Description:
Armed with the Unified Modeling Language (UML), there's little doubt that today's design tools can help you create better software. UML for Visual Basic 6 Developers covers software design and UML using two popular modeling tools. Besides excellent coverage of object design and UML basics, the authors provide a useful case study for a Visual Basic intranet application. After introducing object fundamentals, Harmon and Sawyer look at today's iterative methodologies for software design. Important concepts such as round-trip engineering are introduced. (This term means that design documents and actual code can be updated throughout the software cycle.) They also present the basic UML design documents, such as use case, class, and implementation diagrams. Next the authors examine the strengths of Visual Basic 6 as an object-oriented language. The Microsoft Visual Modeler and the more powerful Rational Rose 98 CASE tool come next. It's here that the details of UML emerge. Modeling a Web-based order fulfillment system for a hypothetical furniture company, the authors cover basic UML notation for all common diagrams. (They turn to Rational Rose for their examples when a UML feature isn't supported in Visual Modeler.) Later sections look at Microsoft DCOM, the technology that underpins Visual Basic components. There is good coverage of Visual Basic's three-tiered architecture. The final product, an intranet Visual Basic application that uses Active Documents, shows that Visual Basic is indeed ready for today's Web. This authoritative and wide-ranging book covers all you need to know to get up to speed with the latest and greatest in UML used with Visual Basic. --Richard Dragan
| 
