In the summer of 2004, Microsoft finally let the world know what they were going to do about the fact that IBM now owned much of the UML software market. They announced a new product that will be included in VS.NET 2005 called Team System for Visual Studio. Marie Huwe, general manager for Microsoft's Developer and Platform Evangelism Division was quoted as saying, "We're designing for ease of use, and we didn't think UML was the way to go." Funny, they used to think that UML was the way to go.
Ah well ... the important thing is that you think about design before starting to code. The software vendors, including Microsoft, are always going to place difficult choices in your path. But at least there will be some new features for analysis and design in future versions of VB.NET that we can look forward to trying out.
