Rate My Network Diagram

In the post yesterday, I started to cover some analytic ways to think about building up data intensive diagrams. In future posts, I’ll spend a little more time talking about how to use those tools for specific diagram types.  Of course, another great way to build great diagrams is to learn from examples. For network diagrams,…


Presenting Your Data in Diagrams

When you are looking to persuade or enlighten, you need to be able to do a great job of presenting information in a way that your audience will understand. As we worked on Visio “12” one of our main goals was to make it incredibly easy to create great looking diagrams that present large amounts…


Visio 2003 Resource Kit for IT Professionals

The first version of the Resource Kit for IT Professionals was a huge hit with customers, so a few months back an updated version was created. The new kit still includes the Altima shapes that were in the first version, but adds LANSurveyor from Neon Software (replacing the previous network mapping product) and Rackwise from…


Visio Connector for Project/EPM/SPS

A new tool (including source code) has been posted on GotDotNet: the Visio Connector for Project/EPM/SPS. This is useful by itself but also provides a great way to learn about connecting Visio with some of the most popular data sources out there. It can be used as a starting point for your own projects. Features: Generate project…


Visio "12" blog

Eric Rockey, the Lead Program Manager for Visio, has started a blog that will cover the new features in the next version of Visio. This is a huge release for us, so make sure to check out the great stuff he is covering.


Creating Visio COM Add-ins with Visual Studio 2005

The Add-in/Add-on wizards that shipped with the Visio 2003 SDK are designed for Visual Studio 2003. They don’t work with Visual Studio 2005. You can still easily create Visio COM add-ins in VS2005 with just a couple extra steps by using the Shared Add-in Wizard: Select File>New>Project. For Project types, choose the Extensibility category under…


Additional tricks for building UI mockups with Visio

In this post, Mai-lan talks about how we use Visio to build mockups of the UI for new features. Of course, when you are building these types of mockups, it is usually important to show the flow through the feature. In other words, you create a number of screens and click through them (possibly using…


Save as Web and IE security

The Visio “Save as Web Page” feature (updated in Visio 2003) is really great if you need to put your diagram on the web (File>Save as Web Page…). It goes way beyond just showing you a static image — you can also pan and zoom, check out the custom properties behind a shape, search the…