EA 11 Beta 1

[Kevin G. Watson]

Hello, it has been a long time since I have used EA... so I'm guessing that I'm really rusty.

I am completely unable to fathom how I connect EA to Visual Studio 2013.  I cant find the help topic, the MDG technology... I'm at a loss ;-)

I'm thinking this is a documentation / Help topic issue... but I cant find any reference to how to use cloud repositories, can I use Azure SQL?

Is the documentation not in sync with the software.

On the other hand really pleased to see that the beta is being released in a trial edition and not just to registered users.  So its not all bad.

Thank you,
Kevin [smiley=2vrolijk_08.gif]

[Eve]

how I connect EA to Visual Studio 2013

It's a separate product, and the 2013 integration version hasn't been released.

how to use cloud repositories, can I use Azure SQL?

There's nothing currently explicitly handling azure sql, but I believe that there is a community resource on how the db scripts can be modified to use azure. (From memory it's changing the indexes to clusters)

[Aaron B]

RE: Azure - Here are some related forum threads that turned up after a couple of searches:
http://www.sparxsystems.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?num=1349794108
http://www.sparxsystems.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?num=1326934114

And also a whitepaper from LieberLieber which may be of interest:
http://blog.lieberlieber.com/2012/06/11/whitepaper-enterprise-architect-goes-cloud/

[Kevin G. Watson]

Hello, that was a fast response, thank you

@Simon, have you any information when VS2013 integration version will be released?  I'm a little confused around 'separate product', examination of the edition comparison table seems to suggest that in the Ultimate edition (for example) that integration with VS2008, VS2010., and VS2012 is included;  will this change with EA 11?

@Aaron, thank you for furnishing those links, I've always found it difficult to search the forums for specific information ( which I always feel are a treasure trove ).  I will go explore them and the white paper later this evening.

One of the areas I am particularly interested in is the idea of a distributed repository.  The OMG recently published a white paper authored by ModelioSoft that outlined a shared distributed model repository.  It concentrated on outlining how different interest groups within a team might compartmentalise parts ( fragments ) of the model, in separate stores.  It did touch on providing public repositories for common frameworks, ( .Net Framework for ex, or public API's like Twitter or the automation interface of EA )... It struck me as an interesting way to increase model reuse.  Has Sparx got anything like this?  From memory EA has a very centralist approach one model one repository;  I feel like I'm cheating asking that btw, what is evaluation for if not discovery like that?

Thank you again for you're attention and help.
Regards,
Kevin [smiley=2vrolijk_08.gif]

[Eve]

Ultimate License includes any Sparx Systems add-ins that you want to download and install separately, but they are still separate products.

The Reusable Asset Server, which is part of the 11 release (but I believe the server is currently not available for trial users) allows sharing individual packages but you still need to import them into your model to use them.

[RoyC]

You might be interested in this too.

http://www.sparxsystems.com/enterprise_architect_user_guide/10/projects_and_teams/sharedrepositoryrefdata.html

[Kevin G. Watson]

Hi there guys

@Simon, thanks for clearing that up.  That makes complete sense to me now;  a number of clients where unable to complete satisfactory reviews a few years back mainly because they could not connect to the current version of VS. We explained it then, as now, that Sparx hadn't released the integration yet which addressed their concerns and we moved on.  Now I can be much more informative.

I thought 'The Reusable Asset Server' (but hadn't got around to exploring) was interesting and possibly might addressed the common sharing aspect.  Hopefully in a future release Sparx will enable it in the trial.  Being able to share at the package level is better than no sharing, although Modeliosoft's outline seemed to be suggesting a much finer grain than that, at class or object level (ie being able to create an association between a class in my model to a class in the share repository, or an attribute).  They also implied that it maintained a reference to the external repository rather than importing the whole package; which would have significant impact on reducing the size of the model the user is working on.  Simplifying the separation of users concerns, ie requirement and use case modellers, not having to navigate test case modelling or implementation details; each group of users having access only to the parts of the model that concern them.  Many of the folks I have listened to have also welcomed the decentralised security of this repository structure, particularly those with outsourced providers, and enterprise silos.  Sharing is important and some of those frameworks are really huge (.Net Framework the amount of stuff that is reverse engineered into a simple console template app is astonishing large, when all you've done is Console.Writeline("Hello World")).

@Royc thanks, I shall read that later.

This morning I'm going to play with the new state machine generator, and see if I can get a handle on the new Actions and Object-flows in activity diagrams.

Can I produce EA Automation Interface activities diagrammatically?  One of my sponsors has specifically asked me to investigate this aspect;  without any prodding on my part.

Thank you again for your help and insight.
Regards,
Kevin [smiley=2vrolijk_08.gif]