Someone e-mailed me off-line and pointed out that I post UML diagrams on my blog fairly regularly. He wanted to know what tool I use for this. In the process, his e-mail reminded me that I had written a post back in March of 2009, where I said that an upcoming post would talk about this. Promises, promises!

Actually, now is a really good time to have this conversation because with the work I am doing on the Exchange Web Service code, I have just finished revamping my internal infrastructure to support the equipment and software I need to do the job. So this is going to be a two-part article. In this part, I’ll tell you about the software development components that I use. In the next part, I’ll tell you about the infrastructure components. The problem is that you need to understand some of the details of why, so I’m going to start with a little background.