In a previous post I gave you a brief description of Click-Once vs. Windows Installer based deployment choices and how to choose between the two. In this post I will describe in detail how to setup a Windows Installer (MSI) based project for deploying your VSTO 3.0 Visio 2007 add-in. This MSDN article has more…
Create Perfect Previews for your Templates
We have all seen the high quality previews that are shown from the Getting Started task pane. If you select any of the templates that are installed with the product they all display a high resolution preview. As a Visio solution developer you create your own setup (MSI) and publish your template(s) using the Visio…
Calling Selection.AutomaticLink from a C# add-in
The Developer Reference and the SDK both show examples of how to use the AutomaticLink method of the Selection object but nobody has a sample of its use in C#. The sample below uses a dataset that has a column name of “Object Name” with a value that should match to a shape data field…
PostBuildEvent for Visio Solution Publishing
If you are like most people you probably hate repetitive tasks. Adding the necessary changes to your MSI for PublishComponents support using the Visio Solution Publishing tool is one of these tasks. Not only that, if you deploy your MSI to a Vista machine you will also need to tweak the Custom Action that is…
VSTO 3.0 and Visio 2007 Essentials
Visual Studio Tools for Office 3.0 (VSTO) is the latest release of VSTO since the 2005 SE release. If you are a Visio add-in developer you probably already know that the 2005 SE release was the first version of VSTO that provided support for Visio add-ins. Before this your managed add-ins were either running unsecured…
Visio 2007 Standard vs. Professional, there is a difference
Like previous versions of Microsoft Office Visio, the 2007 release has distinct editions, Standard and Professional. In the past differences between these editions were limited to additional content like templates, stencils and add-ons. With the 2007 version there is actually a difference in the engine making it important to determine what edition of Visio your…
Another Visio Development Blog?
First let me introduce myself, I am Chris Hopkins and I am an Application Development Consultant at Microsoft focusing on Visio solutions development. I recently joined Microsoft but my Visio experience is extensive. Before accepting this new role I was a developer working for a Microsoft Partner focused on Visio solution development and before that…