Recently I recieved?the product evaluation CD for IBM Rational XDE Developer Plus (.NET Edition). XDE combines visual modeling, runtime analysis and testing from inside the Visual Studio .NET IDE. Some?other XDE features are:
- Roundtrip engineering (Visual C# .NET, Visual Basic .NET, and ASP.NET)
- Automatic or on demand code synchronization
- Free-form diagramming to enhance diagrams with pictures, shapes, and colors
- Reverse engineering of database assets into data models
- Database synchronization
- Web publishing and report generation
- Runtime analysis to detect memory errors, highlight application performance bottlenecks, and identify untested code
Overall, I found?XDE to be a nice?add-on tool for VS.NET specially?for projects involving UML, higher logic complexity and larger work teams. If you have been a?user of Rational products and also develop in VS.NET then you will really like XDE as it allows for everything from code development, visual modeling, runtime analysis, test environment, debugging and deployment, from within the VS.NET IDE.