Hi Doug,

>>Have you had a chance to evaluate the product (Visual UML) and are you convinced that the product (apart from their lousy customer service <g>) would be worth the $$? The reason I ask is that I am also thinking of purchasing this product as well.

Well, because of the customer service I won't recommend it (I promised that to Visual Object Modelers *g*), but technically speaking: Yes, the product itself worth the money, I'm not so sure about the support plan. 25% seems a bit high for an annual fee when the update itself is only $95.

It's probably easier to list problems: The biggest issue I found is that it doesn't seem to have an undo. Saving a 450 KB UML diagram was quite slow, took almost a minute. One time it crashed when I deleted a diagram. Another time it didn't quit and kept CPU activity at 95%, but I guess that was caused by the VBOX software that is used to protect the application.

On the positive list: It really was designed for UML, unlike Visio that, for example, doesn't really "know" about the relationship between a class and a generalization. The XML export is fast (a magnitude faster than saving in its own format *g*) and the generated XML file quite understandable. That and the automation interface make VUML quite flexible. It supports a wide variety of export formats. Inside the diagram it shows wwere the physical page ends so that you can design a diagram in a way that makes it still usable when you print it. You can control the appearance of each element separately, for example if operations or attributes should be shown, what about inherited PEMs, Parameters, etc.

Christof