John Goldsmith's visLog

Enhancing Visio Event Monitor Output

The Visio Event Monitor that's part of the SDK is a great tool for understanding how Visio works and the events that are firing away while you work. So in this post I thought I'd demonstrate a quick technique for making the output a little easier to read.

Visio Congress Shapes - Construction

Following on from my previous post, I thought I'd move on and look at some interesting aspects of the Congress shapes from a Visio construction perspective.

Creating an IsMetric function in Visio

In Visio, a page's drawing units are defined by the value found in the DrawingScale cell. Like all cells you can interrogate this in code via the Cell.Units property, but in the ShapeSheet, there's no direct method to find out the same information. So I thought I'd write down one way you could approach this.

FormulaU and FormulaForceU in Visio

This is a quick post on some of the differences between the two methods of setting a cell formula.

Using Util.Dif in LINQPad with Visio

As of version 5.25, LINQPad has a new object diff’ing method that’s great for comparing objects and tracking down problems in code and this, of course, also applies to Visio.

Action cell execution in Visio

Action cells in Visio react differently from the others and you can use this behaviour to your advantage when building complex shapes.

Using a 2D lookup array in Visio

In this post, I’m going to look at one method to provide a lookup in a 2D array, which could be used, for example, to map cells in the ShapeSheet to a table collection.

Course files for Visio Flyby for Developers on CH9

I had a question recently asking for the associated files for the Visio Flyby for Developers course on Channel 9.  So I’ve put together a zip package that includes:

• the ShapeSheet and Data Linking demo
• the starting VBA table layout demo
• more involved event listening in the form of VBA / WithEvents and C# delegate and sink events (VSTO addin)
• and a PowerShell script for iterating site collections in SharePoint Online (+ associated stencil and template)

You can download the zip package here and I hope you find the files useful in creating your own solutions!

New Visio training videos

Today I’m releasing a new training course on Channel 9. The course is aimed at developers who are new to Visio, but need a quick overview of how Visio works under the covers.

The course is split into two parts:

• Shapes, Stencils and Templates
• Code and Extensibility

[Note, that even if you have no desire to write code, you might still find the first part useful if you’re interested in creating your own shapes and masters.]

Building a labelled dynamic connector in Visio

Connected diagrams can often get a little crowded with various dynamic connectors running between multiple nodes and so it can be useful to hide some of the connecting lines.  Of course you still need to make sense of what’s connected to what so adding labels to a connector can be helpful.  The challenge is positioning those labels in what is, by definition, a truly dynamic shape.