Dan Brown, a blog reader, writes for Boxes and Arrows, an online magazine for information architects. His articles focus on tools and best practices for preparing information architecture deliverables. Dan has written some interesting articles on Visio recently, namely creating an annotation widget for wireframes, creating a shape that you can toggle (what we call…
Dev Luv: Are You A Visio Shape Developer?
Which option best describes how you use Visio shapes? (a) I only use the shapes that ship in the box or that I see in other peoples’ drawings; I don’t make any modification to the shapes when I use them. (b) I modify existing shapes with color or other formatting changes and reuse those shapes;…
Great Shapes for Conceptual Architecture Diagrams in Visio (Part 3)
Jeff, a blog reader, noticed a cool Web service shape in a .NET article posted on MSDN. Here’s what the diagram looks like. The Web services shape isn’t a Visio shape that I’ve seen before so I contacted the authors of the article here at Microsoft. After weaving through several orgs, I found Eugenio from…
Using Visio Diagrams in Word Documents
Geetesh Bajaj, who owns http://www.indezine.com, has a nice, quick summary of how to use Visio diagrams in Word documents in this article: http://www.indezine.com/products/visio/visioword.html. Thanks to blog reader Alexey for the heads-up! Thanks,Mai-lan
Great Shapes for Conceptual Architecture Diagrams in Visio (Part 2)
Sorry that I haven’t been posting frequently since Thanksgiving — it gets super busy around the holidays, and unfortunately, my blogging time has suffered. I can’t promise that it will get better through December, especially since I’m planning a work-free holiday around Christmas but I will resume full blogging frequency in the new year. Tonight…
Dev Luv: Identify Visio Shapes By ID, Not Name
The name of a Visio shape is not unique on a page. The name is only unique in its container. Visio developers often try to identify shapes or types of shapes using the Shape.Name property. This can cause problems for two reasons: users can modify the shape’s Name property using the Format | Special dialog…
The Difference Between Visio’s Two Resource Toolkits
Visio 2003 has two resource toolkits which have similar names. The Microsoft Office Visio 2003 Resource Kit Tools targets the IT professional who is deploying Visio 2003 in a corporate environment. This toolkit is free for download, and contains tools and documentation to simplify deployment across multiple clients. For example, the toolkit contains a setup…
Visio for Enterprise Architects Versioning (and other responses to blog feedback)
Readers of my last blog on conceptual architecture shapes asked why they couldn’t find the new networking shapes with the latest version of Visio for Enterprise Architects (10.0.5110). Releases of Visio for Enterprise Architecture (VEA) and Microsoft Office Visio are not synchronized. VEA ships with Visual Studio and therefore ships on the Visual Studio release…
Great Shapes for Conceptual Architecture Diagrams in Visio (Part 1)
I’ve gotten multiple requests from blog readers to show how to get the same visual quality as seen in architectural diagrams posted on MSDN articles. Typically the Microsoft authors of MSDN articles use Visio to create the diagram. The diagram is then touched up for color or effects by a designer before posting on MSDN….
Dev Luv: Four Best Practices When Event Handling in Visio
1. Avoid Holding onto Multiple Visio Objects: If you need to keep track of Visio, pages, documents or shapes, use IDs instead of objects. A given shape can always be associated with a tuple <document ID, page ID, shape GUID>. 2. Use AddAdvise/IVisEventSink Event Handling: AddAdvise/IVisEventSink is more efficient than using IConnectionPoint since the solution…