Visio Services Virtual Labs now available

While enhancements to Visio 2010 make it a compelling business intelligence (BI) solution, I have seen it continue to be perceived primarily as a simple diagramming application. To display the power of Visio 2010 as BI solution, this blog highlights a series of 5 FREE online labs that will help you save money, by teaching…


Too many connectors? Toggle them on and off presentation style

I got this question again today and decided to throw together a quick sample demonstrating how you can toggle the visibility of connectors using a little bit of code and the Visio Object Model. This is no where near a perfect, hardened solution as I literally put this together in about 5 minutes ( it…


Adding the SharePoint 2010 project templates to Visual Studio 2010

Since the release of Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint 2010 I have done all my SharePoint development on a machine that had both applications installed locally.  This certainly makes it easy as the development tools are loaded locally with the SharePoint environment, allowing easy deployment and debugging. Visual Studio includes a collection of project templates…


Windows 8 keyboard shortcuts visualized in Visio

As you know I use Visio for everything and thus I have put together a set of shapes to help me visualize the keyboard shortcuts for Windows 8 Consumer Preview that I like to keep handy. I can use this for slides in my presentations but mostly I just edit the desktop background image that…


Visio and SharePoint extensions for System Center 2012 Released

Yesterday the Operations Manager team released an update to the wildly popular Visio add-in that allows you to visualize your monitoring data from Operation Manager in your Visio diagrams using the new Visio Services functionality available in SharePoint 2010. Click here to read the details about this update and to download this new version http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2012/04/02/visio-and-sharepoint-extensions-for-system-center-2012-released.aspx


Data Graphics not being displayed for diagrams configured for the SCOM add-in

Recently a bug was discovered in the SCOM add-in ( download here ) which prevents the add-in from applying the cool custom data graphic icon set on any shapes that are linked to SCOM data. Luckily there are a few workarounds: For existing diagrams: Download the attached Visio drawing. Open the attached Visio diagram. Copy…


Modify the Workflow Visualization Diagram

When you choose to publish a SharePoint Workflow from SharePoint Designer you have the option to generate a visualization of the workflow.  This setting is found on the Workflow Settings page in SharePoint Designer when editing a workflow. If you check this option, SharePoint Designer creates a Visio diagram that is used to display the…


Enable Visio Services data refresh using script

In a previous post I showed you how to edit the web.config file to disable the data refresh prompt so that diagrams will always refresh when rendered, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/chhopkin/archive/2010/09/28/force-data-refresh-for-published-diagrams.aspx.  This method affects all diagrams that are viewed in the browser or rendered in the Visio Web Access web part. If you do not have access to…