Rational XDE Professional for .NET 2.1

ASP.NET PRO magazine: "XDE also includes some great capability for implementing and defining patterns in your designs. Patterns allow you to share not only code, but documentation, design, and higher-level knowledge, as well. XDE ships with wizards for all the well known Gang-of-Four (GOF) patterns, and Rational is cultivating a developer exchange community for making other patterns available on its http://www.rational.net site. One pattern of interest available there now is the WebServiceWrapper pattern that lets you create wrappers quickly for library classes that you want to expose as a Web service.

As with most complex products, it is very difficult to do it justice with a short review like this. Overall, I have been very impressed and pleased with XDE. The tight integration of the tool with the VS .NET IDE greatly decreases the conceptual distance between your design and your code, which not only matches a programmer's thought process better, but it makes the modeling process more achievable as well. It is still a fairly new product and has a few rough edges here and there that you might stumble upon, such as some cryptic error messages during drag-and-drop operations that are not allowed. But if you put it up against your other modeling options out there, I think Rational XDE Professional for .NET is a clear winner as the best UML modeling tool available for .NET development."