At just over four years in the Dynamics AX team, I shipped two major releases (Dynamics AX 2009 & Dynamics AX 2012) and contributed to things you'll be seeing in the future. And now it's time to take a new journey.   WHAT I LEARNED Customers...

This came up at work today, so I thought I’d share. We were using the Microsoft Chart Controls and didn’t know how handle the case where the number of series in the was unknown – in other words the number of series are defined by the data fed to the chart...

If you need to do a lot of image file format conversion, then this PowerShell script will be very helpful. You can adapt it to do all sorts of tasks: creating thumbnails, converting audio or video with different tools, etc. http://viziblr.com/news/2012...

PNG is always the right answer, except not always. There are some cases where JPEG is going to be a better experience for your users. Learn what those case are and how JPEG can be useful. http://viziblr.com/news/2011/12/29/advanced-screenshots-for-your...

Need to get consistent widths or heights for shapes? You don’t need to do this manually or use macros. There’s a simple solution in Visio 2007 and Visio 2010 – Use the Size and Position Window to make precise changes to many shapes at once. http://viziblr...

If there were a visual way to describe what refactoring code feels like when I use Resharper this video does it. It captures that ephemeral sense of effortlessly being able to transform and slice and move code in a way I don’t believe is possible through...

I’ve been using Plastic SCM 3.0 for most of the last year and despite someone from the Plastic SCM team personally giving me demo (thank you!) I never got to the task of writing up what I thought about it. With the release of Plastic SCM 4.0 it is a good...

My favorite song today. Folks, this is true passion. (For the record, I am part of the small exodus to Linux Mint) http://soundcloud.com/bkerensa/foss-yeaaaah

Need to render one of these or just want to learn how?   You are in luck. Got some code for you at the link below. It’s a simple educational sample that has plenty of room for optimization. Also, I think I may start using it as a coding question...

Learn how to get fine-grained control over your shape text by controlling character spacing. http://viziblr.com/news/2011/11/13/visio-ndash-controlling-character-spacing-screencast.html  

Despite having one of the least exciting titles, in this blog post I’ll show you how I solved a problem we were having at work. I know this is a common problem you encounter, so I think you’ll find this solution helpful. THE SITUATION As you know our...

Learn two ways to get this done via this screencast. http://viziblr.com/news/2011/11/1/visiondash-adding-shadows-to-text.html

I am known to be a challenging interviewer at Microsoft. The question below is the the interview question that candidates, regardless of their level of experience, have had the greatest difficulty answering. I’ll admit it is an aggressive question. What...

Many of you know I am a fan of Python (and IronPython) and maybe a few of you know how impressed I’ve been with the PyPy project. PyPy is an important development in the Python community and I want to see it continue and succeed. To that end I have personally...

This checklist is both useful and funny. On a serious note, if you are deep into a specific field, you should develop something like this to help you evaluate design options. (click on picture to get to checklist) Found via this post on Reddit

Ever wanted a Visio shape with *two* edges instead of one. You can do this with custom line patterns. This screencast will show you how .  

Ages ago I worked on a Microsoft project called Mako – a project whose technologies, philosophies, team members would would go on to form the Forefront Client Security product. I owned the User Experience team in Mako . So keep it in mind that I and my...

  If you working with URLS – either with existing APIs or creating your own – it’s with it to check out this diagram by Tantek Çelik. I’ve wirtten up a few comments about it. Definitely one of the best technical diagrams I’ve seen lately. It represents...

It’s a monthly podcast by Larry Hastings and the first episode has been published. I listened to that first episode yesterday and was pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed the news + discussion format (which in the first episode includes Guido, FYI). Definitely...

A screencast showing how to make pages that are hidden in a document. Also discover a few tips for using pages in general.  

In Part 4 I created a separate C# project and imported it. Things were working fine except for Intellisense was not available. Here is a screenshot showing the simplified code and Intellisense *not” happening after I type import VisUtil and type “VisUtil...

Searching for “IronPython” on YouTube and sorting by “Upload date” revealed this gem. Frankly it’s the most interesting “IronPython” video out there ;-)  

The last blog post was a peek ahead. But we need to go backwards a bit because if we continue on that path in a naïve way, what you are going to see is that to fully exploit capabilities of Visio via IronPython is going pose some challenges: First, we...

This screencast will give you a peek at where I am headed with these blog posts: the use of IronPython and Visio to create (nice-looking) Infographics The previous posts (1, 2) were about getting started with the Python Tools for Visual Studio. Now we...

In the Part 1 we explored creating a simple project , now we will work with Visio interactively using the IronPython Interactive shell that is part of Python Tools for Visio Studio 2010 . Launch Visual Studio and Under Tools > Python Tools click on...