Here is what I did to create an Entity Relationship diagram for a project at work.
Prepare for the solution at this Stack Overflow article
- Download SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) for Visual Studio
- Modify Visual Studio by adding or removing workloads and components
Follow the steps listed in the answer at the SO article.
- Open Visual Studio
- Create a project or open an existing project (must be Visual Basic, Visual C# project, or Console Application)
- Right-click the project and choose Add -> New Item…
- Under Visual C# Items select “Data”
- Select the template “ADO.NET Entity Data Model”
- Give it a name and click “Add”
- Select “Generate from database” or “Empty model”
- If “Generate from database” selected enter connection info, choose the database objects and done!
The model is stored as a “.edmx” file.
- In the visual representation of the edmx file in Visual Studio, arrange the entities so that the relationships are easy to follow.
- Right click in the edmx file and choose Diagram -> Export as image. Save the image.
