Mai-lan's Visio Blog

Microsoft is hosting a Visio conference from January 19-20, 2006 in Seattle. It's downtown by the water in the Seattle Waterfront Marriott. The show is 70% sold out already, so if you're interested, snag tickets now. Steve Ballmer is the keynote speaker...

Readers have asked me for examples of other tools that use Visio for business process analysis. One particularly nice example is IT Pearls, which has a Visio 2003 add-in called Process Modeler for Visio. It includes a set of BPMN (Business Process Modeling...

One of the most common questions that I get involves how to paste Visio diagrams into Word without bloating the diagram size. When you cut and paste a Visio diagram into another Office diagram, you are putting an OLE object in your document. Because you...

Makoto writes a great Visio blog in Japanese. He knows a ton about Visio. I don't read Japanese but I drop by occasionally to check out the screenshots. It's interesting to see the diagrams in the Japanese market. http://blogs.msdn.com/visioj

Dan Brown has put together a neat little Visio accessory -- a Visio reference mousepad with the keyboard shortcuts, some of which I blogged about last year, and other useful reference info. Check it out! http://www.cafepress.com/greenonions.20098068...

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 has a bug that breaks debugging for WinForm applications that host the Visio 2003 Drawing Control. The problem is caused by the new VSHost process (more information can be found here http://blogs.msdn.com/dtemp/archive/2004/08...

Visio does not natively support BPEL or BPMN, which are both commonly used in business process management applications. BPMN stands for "Business Process Modeling Notation" and is a proposed standardization for graphical notation for enterprise processes...

Visio lets people communicate business information in a variety of innovative ways. One example is in use by the Visio team for revenue reporting. The Visio product management team built a dynamic bubble chart diagram to report on Visio sales by national...

The shapes that you see on the stencil on the left pane of Visio are called “masters.” Think of a master as an object. When you drag a master from the stencil, you are dropping an instance of that master object onto the page. That instance, which we call...

I’ve posted a whitepaper from the Office Supportability Group that details what is in Office SP1, which everyone should install if you are using any Office 2003 application. SP1 is available as separate downloadable patches for OneNote, MUIs, Project...

If you're developing on the Visio 2003 ActiveX control, please install this hotfix: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;884592 It fixes a nasty page fault problem in the control. Developers and end users of the control solutions should...

I’m doing a webcast tomorrow called “Programming the Visio Development Platform” if you want to check it out. You can register for it at: http://www.microsoft.com/events/EventDetails.aspx?CMTYSvcSource=MSCOMMedia&Params=%7eCMTYDataSvcParams%5e%7earg...

There is a whole methodology called “Balanced Scorecard” which focuses on providing access to metrics on quality, customer satisfaction, and other key business categories for success. Balanced Scorecard hinges on the axiom that “if you can’t measure it...

The customer base for the Microsoft Operations Server (MOM) overlaps pretty significantly with Visio’s customer base. Most of the IT professional desktops that use MOM have Visio installed for network diagramming, database modeling, and process diagrams...

I’ve gotten some questions about Visio’s ability to import or export XAML-based graphics files. Visio can’t do this today but you can use Visio 2003’s SVG functionality to achieve the same goal. You can save a Visio diagram out as SVG and then use a SVG...

We just published an article on MSDN that provides a step-by-step tutorial for using ShapeStudio to build shapes. It’s a good way to get started with the tool since it walks through the typical actions a shape developer might take. -- Mai-lan

Do you struggle with getting your shapes just right in your Visio diagrams? Do you have limited time and interest for going through a Visio user book? Here’s an easy way to update your Visio knowledge: take free online Microsoft tutorials that introduce...

The Visio 2003 Drawing Control does not work in the Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1. We’ve done some testing on more recent builds of the VS 2005 bits (post-beta 1 bits), and the control does work in the more recent builds. This will be fixed by Visual Studio...

Visio 2003 lets developers integrate their Visio content installation with a Windows Installer application. There are publish component table entries that can be added to MSI files to tell Visio about new Visio content (stencils, templates and add-ons...

When I gave my talk at the Microsoft Office System Developer Conference, I was surprised how few folks had heard about the Visio Viewer. Visio has shipped a free viewer for the last two releases of the product. You can download a Visio Viewer for Visio...

Last week, Microsoft hosted the Microsoft Office System Developer conference , the first ever developer conference solely targeted at the Office developer last week. I presented a well-attended session called “ Programming the Visio Graphical Platform...

A blog reader asked if it was possible to get a cheaper digital certificate for a smaller dev shop. I looked into this and unfortunately, there is no special discount for individual software production houses. The real issue when talking certificates...

I’ve gotten lots of mail from Visio blog readers who are still confused about how digital signing works for any Office solution. Siew-Moi Khor, a Programmer/Writer in the MS Office organization who writes seriously good documentation on complex topics...

There is a 30-day trial version of Visio 2003 , if you want to check it out. Almost everything I blog about is based on Visio 2003. If you have an earlier version or have never installed Visio, you can check out the trial version of the latest and greatest...

Among other things, Program Managers at Microsoft design the user interface experience for the next generation of product. We work with our graphic designers determine the goals, color, font, and common design elements for screens, but in many groups...