Diff. between Visio Ent. Architect and Visio Pro 2003

[Mark Teague]

Greetings Visio Community,

I am interested in using Visio within a development team of about 5
developers for UML and database modeling. I am trying to determine whether
we should license Visio Professional 2003 or Visio Enterprise Architect (as
bundled with Visual Studio.Net 2003 Enterprise Architect). We are currently
using Visual Studio.Net 2003 Professional, so I guess we would upgrade those
licenses to the Enterprise Architect product.

Can anyone give me a summary of the differences in functionality from an
application architect's perspective between the Visio Professional 2003 and
Visio Enterprise Architect products? In particular, I need to know:

Does the EA version have additional functionality to support/facilitate
round-trip engineering of .Net based code (yes, I'm still on the quest for
this holy grail)? Or is the functionality identical in both?

Also, do both versions support forward/reverse-engineering of ER models
to/from relational database instances? I am seeing from the Visio
Professional 2003 trial version that the data modeling functionality is
supported, but I thought at one time it was removed from the Professional
product and only available in the Enterprise Architect version?

Thanks in advance,
Mark Teague
Programmer/Analyst
ETSU - Office of Information Technology

 

[Al Edlund]

The short answer is that EA has the forward engineering of database and uml
class generation, professional does not. Thus for development the answer
becomes pretty clear.
Al