Borland's new model of Togetherness boosts .Net development

By Alun Williams

Posted on 26 May 2004 at 12:38

'Bringing affordable modelling to the masses' is Borland's claim for its new programming support tool, Together Edition for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET v2.0.

The company has continued its support for the .Net framework in general and Visual Studio .Net in particular with the second release of its UML-based software development design and modelling tool.

'Many forward-looking companies are already on-board with Microsoft .NET for the competitive edge it offers, but they face an increasingly complex application development environment,' said Raaj Shinde, general manager for the Borland Together Business Unit. 'Modelling is playing a key role [in reducing these development risks]. Together Edition for Visual Studio was the first advanced modelling environment to exist for .NET technologies, and we're now building on its success to bring more affordable modelling to the masses.'

Aimed at C# and Visual Basic .NET development teams, features new to version 2.0 include support for roundtrip engineering for VB .NET projects (LiveSource technology synchronises any changes between code and models), audit information for C# projects and improved documentation generation.

Paul Kuzan, European product line manager of Together products, emphasised both the relatively low-price for the product (£135 ex VAT for a single licence) compared to traditional pricing for modelling tools, and also Borland's role as an independent, third-party provider of .Net tools.

'As an independent vendor,' said Kuzan, ' we don't hang our hat on any particular language or deployment.' And he maintained this flexibility helped mitigate future risks in fast changing development environments. Together already supports Eclipse (Java), JBuiler and CBuilder environments, and now natively supports Visual Studio.Net.

The tool uses UML 1.3 and 1.4m, and with UML 2.0 nearing ratification Borland promises migration support tools before the end of 2004.

Together Edition for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2.0 requires Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003 to be installed and runs on Windows 2000 (SP2 or higher), XP Professional, or Windows Server 2003. You can find more information on the Together Edition for Visual Studio .NET on the Borland website.