John Goldsmith's visLog

Getting started with C# in LINQPad with Visio

This post is about how to use LINQPad to enable you to write C# against Visio in a similar way you use VBA.

Setting Visio icon sub-shapes code utility

A couple of posts ago I covered one way of adding ‘Positioning icons in a Visio group shape’.  This post follows up with a small code utility to take some of the leg work out of adding all of the group and sub-shape cells.

Book review - Microsoft Visio 2013 Business Process Diagramming and Validation

Almost four years ago I reviewed a new book by Visio MVP David Parker.  It was about Process Diagramming and Validation.  The Validation part of this was a new feature in Visio 2010 and only available in the top edition, 'Premium'.  In the interim, Visio 2013 has emerged and the available editions are back to two - 'Standard' and 'Professional' and this means that Validation, along with Structured Diagramming, are now available to a much wider section of the Visio user base.

Customizing themes in Visio 2013

The new theming model in Visio 2013 delivers a lot of flexibility and allows you to not only set an overarching theme for the page, but also to set variants around that theme and individual styles based on color, effects and font components.  If you want to go further, you can create your own custom color schemes via the UI and, if you want to delve into the ShapeSheet, certain custom theme effects as well.

New Visio 2013 training for developers

There’s a new range of video-based training courses for Visio developers, available via the Office Dev Center.  The course is divided into nine modules, which should take the participant from Level 100 to 300 in a day or two.

Visio 2013 SDK

The new Visio 2013 software development kit is now available for download, and if you’ve not come across previous versions I thought I’d write a quick review of what’s inside.

Indenting multiple tree control items in Visio

The wireframing template in Visio has a treeview control to that allows you to add and remove items, and set their respective indent levels.  By default you can only adjust a single item at a time and even if you create a multiple selection, only the primary item is effected.  A forum question asked how you could make a single change to multiple items and I thought I would write a quick bit of code to show how you might go about it.

Building Visio shapes with code

The last post on ‘Modifying the Visio Grid shape’ demonstrates how to change the resizing behaviour of a complex shape from a ShapeSheet perspective.  I used the word ‘modifying’ but, in fact, it’s actually a new shape and one built using code and it’s this aspect that I thought I’d focus on in this post. 

I’d love to encourage anyone who’s not written any code before to keep reading as I think this makes a good challenge for new coders.  If you’re in that boat then you might also want to have a quick read through Just for starters and Looping through to get you going, but the code below has lots of comments and is hopefully self explanatory.

Customising Contextual Ribbon Tabs In Visio 2010

I’ve recently been transferring some old VBA ShapeSheet utilities over to a c# add-in for Visio 2010 and hit a problem when trying to add some custom groups to the ShapeSheet Design ribbon tab.  Using Ribbon.xml, I was happily able to add groups to either custom tabs or built-in ones such as ‘Home’, but for love nor money couldn’t get anything to show in the ShapeSheet tab. 

Chris Hopkins, from the Visio team, kindly set me straight and the solution was in understanding that not all tabs are created equal and that the ShapeSheet Design tab belongs to a set called Contextual Tabs…

Automating Visio’s Save As Web output

A newsgroup question came up a little while ago about how to automate Visio’s Save As Web function and as this is an area that I’m quite keen on, I thought I’d write a quick post about it.  I’m really just going to cover what’s available in the help files but hopefully it will prove useful just reading from a different perspective.

As I mentioned, all of the documentation is available from the MSDN library, with the additional code samples found in the downloadable Visio 2007 SDK (a 2010 SDK will be available as the Visio gets its official launch in May)…