It’s a first step because, unlike its Eclipse version, the tool is not yet a full-fledged plug-in. It’s a standalone tool that imports and exports from Visual Studio, adapting Microsoft’s worklist feature into a series of architectural simulations that are refined within the tool. Once the architectural model is refined, it is exported to Visual Studio.
A plug-in is planned later on, possibly followed by support of Visual Studio Team System’s Foundation Server.
According to company vice president Frank Waldman, the early .NET support was in response to demand from customers of its C and C++ versions, most of whom were already Microsoft customers. That explains the fact that release of the .NET version came before a full Visual Studio plug-in was ready.
Waldman maintained that entering the .NET market was sort of a breakthrough for several reasons. First, unlike Java, where said that several brute force’ alternatives were available, there’s nothing comparable to what Lattix does in the .NET space.
Second, and this is where he spoke more carefully, he referred to the fact that the Microsoft installed base, which has historically included more casual developers from classic VB, could benefit from some of the modeling disciplines that Lattix offers.
Specifically, it’s what the company calls Lightweight Dependency Modeling, a fancy term for representing in a matrix the dependencies between different parts of an application.
