Till VSTS 2008 there was no support for various architectural diagrams which form the UML. Team Edition for Software Architects supported some non-UML but very practical diagrams. Those diagrams provided us ability to do High Level Design of solution architecture and infrastructure architecture. Except in case of WebService the Application Diagram did not support the Low Level Design and on the infrastructure side, except for deployment diagram no other design elements were supported. Team System 2010 for Architects has quite a number of enhanced capabilities compared to Team Edition of Software Architects 2008. Distributed Diagrams model which was present in the Team Edition for Software Architects 2008 is no longer available with Team System 2010 for Architects.
First two phases of traditional Microsoft Solution Framework (MSF) are Envisioning and Planning. Although some of the architectural diagrams are started to be created in envisioning, the completion of those happen during the planning phase. Planning phase is further divided in three processes which run to an extent parallel but are started with a little bit of phase difference. Those processes are:
· Conceptual Design
· Logical Design
· Physical Design
In this article we will look at the details of various diagrams which are required during each of the design process and check if it is supported by Team System 2010 for Architects. Architectural diagrams can be created using Team System 2010 for Architect in which there is a project template for ‘Modeling Project’ which allows us to create various diagrams. We will take an overview of those in the article.
Conceptual Design: This is a process in which from a hazy cloud of needs, crystallization of requirements happens. Requirements are gathered, analyzed and prioritized. Requirements are modeled using ‘Requirement Document’ and ‘Use Case’ diagrams. We also document the processes that are followed by the business. These processes are workflows within the business system. We can use ‘Activity Diagram’ to model those processes and workflows. During the conceptual design the architect will also list all the user roles that will be interacting with the system and the general architecture of the system. General architecture definition will contain the list of logical layers and physical tiers which will be present in the future state of the system. To model it, we can use the ‘Layer diagram’ which is available in the Team System 2010 for Architects.

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