You can reverse engineer an entire solution or a selected project within a solution. The selections you make in the Visual Studio Solution Explorer determine what is reverse engineered to the Visio UML.

Note  Be sure to build the solution in Visual Studio before reverse engineering to help resolve cross-project references.

In the Visual Studio environment, reverse engineering is activated from a command on the Project menu. Information from the code model is extracted, Visio is launched, and reverse-engineered elements of your code appear as icons in the tree view (tree view: Displayed in a window in the UML Navigator, a hierarchy in which each UML element or view (diagram) is represented by an icon. The UML template automatically creates a tree view of your model.) of the Visio UML Model Explorer. You can then drag UML class shapes that reflect class definitions in the source code onto a drawing page to visualize the architecture of the new or legacy solution.

During a reverse engineering operation, status information about the operation is written to the Visual Studio Output window.

When a project tree view (tree view: Displayed in a window in the UML Navigator, a hierarchy in which each UML element or view (diagram) is represented by an icon. The UML template automatically creates a tree view of your model.) has been reverse engineered, the Visio drawing is added to the solution (solution: The file folder that contains templates for particular drawing types. For example, the Project Schedule solution folder contains the Calendar, Gantt Chart, PERT Chart, and Timeline, templates that you use to create those drawing types.) under Solution Items. Double-clicking the Visio diagram will cause Visio to launch and open the selected file.