Visio Conference 2008 – Agenda now posted

We’ve posted the agenda for the upcoming Visio Conference. This conference will be expanded significantly from the last one, which was more focused on partners. This version will include a lot more end user content. One major note: we will be disclosing a lot of information about the next version of Visio, which promises to…


Visio SharePoint Stencils

  SharePoint has been getting a lot of attention recently, and I’ve seen a lot of requests for stencils to help manage its design and deployment. A former colleague pointed me to this post, which includes a stencil that allows you document site structure. The author is working on some additional SharePoint related stencils and…


Solution Performance Tip 1 – GetFormulas and SetFormulas

One of the most frequent questions I get from partners and other readers of this blog is how to improve the performance of their solution. Usually the first step is to point them to these five performance tips, but I thought it would be interesting to quantify just how much of a difference some of…


Announcing (a bit belatedly) the Visio Conference 2008

This has already been mentioned on some of the other Visio-related blogs, but I wanted to make sure that people are aware of the Visio Conference 2008, taking place here in Redmond in February of next year. The last conference (held in February 2006) was a huge success, with some of the most favorable customer…


Ribbon Baseball Widget for Word 2007 (built using VSTO)

It is baseball playoff time here in the US, so I wrote a Visual Studio Tools for Office 2008 beta add-in that lets you track games right inside the home tab of the Word 2007 ribbon. The add-in shows the score, inning, and base situation for games in progress, tracking them by pulling data from…


Visio Active Directory Topology Diagrammer

One of the most common requests I get from IT users of Visio is for a way to draw out an Active Directory topology map. Visio has Active Directory shapes, but until now it didn’t have the ability to actually go out and create a diagram from AD. We’ve put up a free download that…


More breakdowns of visualization techniques

Coding Horror has a good post summarizing a number of breakdowns similar to the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods that I covered in an earlier post.


Exchange Server 2007 Shapes

A download is available on Microsoft.com containing a stencil and template for Exchange Server 2007. If you do Exchange deployment or management this is worth grabbing. It works with Visio 2003 or 2007.


Upcoming webcast

I’ll be presenting a webcast on the Data Visualization features in Visio on Tuesday, August 7th. Here is a link to the details and registration information.


Data Mining Add-in update

I posted a while back about the new Data Mining Add-ins for Visio and Excel that were created by the SQL Server team. That is one of the more popular posts on this blog, so I know a lot of people have been downloading them. If you have, please note that there is a performance…