Modelling an Application with Visual Studio 2010 – FYP Blogging Series

I’ve been always eager to design a software architecture and do all the modeling and planning before starting the coding phase of my application development. I usually do these stuff on papers, notebooks or flip charts and hang them on my walls. As you might imagine, it looks quite pretty and one can see if I’m dealing hard with a project in that moment when he comes to my house.

My final year project is a software project, a line of business application for health care industry and I’ve been dealing with the project report. But I must admit that I’m pretty sure 90% of what I’ve been writing, will not  be very clear for the readers (the juries). The screen-shots will not be enough so I should add some flow charts and activity diagrams to my report in order to give the image of the prototype well.

OK, I’m cutting it short. I found too many tools online, maybe I could give a shot for a “best 10 uml tools” blog entry later on. For now, this blog entry will be about modeling with Visual Studio 2010 and the modeling project I’ve just learned and made in 15 minutes.

Besides, I must say that this is my first Modeling Project in Visual Studio 2010 and there might be some better ways to implement the work flow. (This is not a professional reference.)

I’m going to visualize the “TreatmentAdvise” function of my project. I have a WPF user control for Treatment Records in my application that is

1. Start the Program
2. Initialize Business Objects
3. Populate Patient List via Data Tier
4. Let user to select a patient
5. Let user to navigate to the treatment control
6. If there is no patient selected yet, GOTO to 1 (Do Nothing, Do Not Allow Navigation p.s. I LOVE GOTO p.s. I Love Commodore)
7. If a patient was selected
   1. Populate the required controls with patient’s information via Business Tier
8. Let user to Insert the treatment details into Treatment Control
9. Let user to right-click and ask for advice according to his treatment details
10. If he asked for advices
    1. Initialize Business Tier and get Treatment Collection
    2. Define a new Treatment Details window and Data Bind details window with treatment collection
11. BINGO ! Go To 4 !

I have an n-tiered architecture for my project and Data Tier means Repository classes to do the CRUD operations and Business Tier for this case is meaning Service classes to process the business object collections. To implement this pseudo code, I’ve created a new Modeling Project and named it as Treatment Adviser. Next to that I’ve added other items to help me clarify the algorithm better.