Well, one more day reading book, I think I have to go straight to third "real life" architecture sample because second one was about another unreleased project. Now it's about Air Traffic Control project, which was funded by FAA, but never was implemented "because of budgeting issues". In real world that means "project was well over budget even before implementation started". Which, in turn, speaks against architecture, because architecture supposed to help projects to be on budget...
Yesterday I subscribed on Channel9 Forums RSS and somebody wrote there that Visual Studio 2005 designer does not support UML. "Huh?", - I thought and went looking for more information. Read three or four articles and found that MS decided not to extend UML 2.0 with their extension, but to create whole new diagram language. Nice turn for Microsoft, wrong for developers. As far as I can see, MS research recognised that most developers use only class diagrams and never use any of the other UML artifacts and developers seldom use Visio, which Microsoft recognizes as full blown UML editor. That's fine, but what about architects? Should they use only class diagrams, which is by definition static views, to describe systems? There is no answer.
I use Enterprise Architect for my work. It is way better than Visio, much better than Rational XDE and would continue to stay better, than rudimentary Visual Studio 2005 tools. And it supports UML 2.0 and extensions. And there is a add-on for Visual Studio, though I haven't tried it.
Back to work...