I mentioned earlier the release of VSTO for Visio Beta 1 users. Now that Beta 2 is available, I’m happy to announce that anyone can try this out. To download the CTP of VSTO “v3”, go here. Note that you need to install Visual Studio first, then Visio 2007 Beta 2, and finally VSTO. The…
Bug in Creating Visio COM Add-ins with Visual Studio 2005
In this post I describe how to create Visio COM Add-ins with VS2005. It turns out that the add-ins created using the shared wizard I create have an issue such that they do not install correctly on machines that don’t have Visual Studio installed (i.e. likely all of your customers machines). There is a KB…
PIAs and Version Compatibility
With the upcoming release of Visio 2007, I’ve had a number of questions recently about the .Net Primary Interop Assemblies (PIA) and how to make a managed COM add-in that works across different versions of Visio. First, a brief history. If you have no idea what I am talking about, you can take a look…
Announcing the Visio Insights Blog
I’d like to let everyone know about the new Visio Insights blog, a joint blog written by the Visio team. The introductory post is up now and the posting schedule should be pretty regular. I’ll continue to post here but will also make some more general posts over there.
Visio 2007 Beta 2 Publicly Available
Along with the rest of the 2007 Office system, Visio 2007 Beta 2 is now available for public download at the download preview site. All you need to be able to install the application is a Windows Live ID/Passport account, which you can set up when you go to that site. Once you’ve downloaded the…
Visio in Visual Studio Tools for Office
A longstanding request from Visio developers has been support in Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). I’m happy to say that for those of you in the Office Beta 1 program, you can start playing around with this now. For details on setting it up, check out this blog post from Andrew Whitechapel on the…
TechEd Session
I’ll be presenting a session at TechEd in Boston on programming the new Visio 2007 data features. Here are the session details: Microsoft Office Visio 2007: Building Data Visualization Solutions Day/Time: Thursday, June 15 8:00 AM – 9:15 AM Room: 259 AB Speaker(s): Bill Morein Your application deals with huge amounts of data, and making sense…
ShapeSheet tutorial, part 1
For this post, I’ll walk through the process of building up a shape from scratch and editing it using the ShapeSheet. The shape itself won’t be too complex, but we’ll cover a few of the interesting features of the ShapeSheet. To get started, create a new blank drawing (File>New>New Drawing). If you are a US…
Introduction to the ShapeSheet
The ShapeSheet is probably the most overlooked part of Visio. The amount of power that you can get by using the ShapeSheet without any programming is pretty amazing. The basic idea is that behind every shape in Visio there is a spreadsheet that defines the shape in terms of its appearance and many other shape…
Visio Conference Kickoff
Customers and partners are starting to arrive in Seattle for the sold out Visio Conference, starting tomorrow. We’re very excited to roll out Visio “12” in detail publicly for the first time. We think that you’ll love what we have done with the product for this release. Although the keynotes and sessions start tomorrow (Thursday),…