Visual Basic Design Patterns
Chapter One
Overview of UML
The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a notation you can use for object-oriented
analysis and design. This chapter contains a brief overview of UML to introduce you to
the subset of UML and extensions to UML used in this book. For a complete description
of UML, see /technology/documents/formal/uml.htm.
Books on UML call the pieces of information stored in instances of a class attributes;
they call a class's encapsulations of behavior operations. Those terms, like UML, are not
specific to any implementation language. However, this book is not language neutral.
It assumes that you are using VB.NET as your implementation language. This book
also uses VB-specific terms in most places, rather than terms that are language neutral
but less familiar to VB.NET programmers. For example, it uses the words operation,
function, and subroutine interchangeably, preferring the VB.NET-specific terms function
and subroutine.
UML defines a number of different kinds of diagrams. The rest of this chapter is
organized into sections that describe different kinds of UML diagrams and the elemen ... read full excerpt from Visual Basic Design Patterns ebook
