100% guaranteed interpretation free Visio UML shapes

I first saw this topic at Ingo Rammer’s blog and downloaded it, althought I hadn’t used it until now. I’m talking about Pavel Hruby’s Visio UML Stencils.

As Ingo says: When using these shapes, Visio doesn’t try to understand or verify your UML diagrams but allows you to just draw. Adding properties to a class for example does not mandate crawling through a four-layer-dialog but can instead be done by just typing in the corresponding part of the shape.

Great if you use Visio just as a documentation tool and not as a code generator. And you really wouldn’t use Visio as a codegen, would you?

I’ve used them now to draw some class diagrams and sequence diagrams. I had to get used to them a bit, but after using them a while, only the gained benefit from not having to crawl through those property pages is great. Maybe I should get used to some big case tool like Rose, but until then I only use my models to copy-n-paste them into a Word document and for that these stencils work great!