There’s been a lot going on this week that I wanted to let you know about.
First of all, of course, Office 2007 Beta 2 (including Visio) has been released and is publicly available, which means that everyone can download and try out this huge release. Beta 2 looks good across the board and Visio in particular is ready to have its tires kicked. Check it out: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx
We’ve also released a Beta 2 version of the Visio 2007 SDK. This includes new wizards for working with Visual Studio 2005, and new code samples that show you how to program against our new data features. You can download the SDK here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=373D34B8-5EF7-4E6E-A582-C8D6B5EE4E33&displaylang=en
Next, the Visual Studio team has made available a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Visual Studio Tools for Office “v3”, which adds support for Visio for the first time. This is exciting news for Visio add-in developers. Go here to download it: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=68978824-CA55-4208-A55E-5C4858183B31&displaylang=en#Overview (One note is that you need to follow a specific installation order: Visual Studio 2005, Office Beta 2, and then VSTO. This is described in the instructions at the bottom of the download page.)
Finally, I’m very excited to announce that we have launched a Visio team blog called “Visio Insights”. This blog is aimed to help you get the most out of Visio and help everyone see what’s possible with our product. The topics will cover everything from end user functionality through developer features, and isn’t necessarily tied to Visio 2007 – we’ll be covering the breadth of what Visio can do, including features that were around in Visio 1.0: http://blogs.msdn.com/visio/ . The first post of Visio Insights also includes a good list of all of the other people out there blogging on Visio.
I’ll still be talking about Visio 2007 features here, but I encourage you to give Visio Insights a read as well.