Today I’m releasing the latest version of the VisioAutomation library on CodePlex: http://visioautomation.codeplex.com/

This was a very large update and took about 6 months of effort.

CHANGES SINCE 1.X

  • The library itself has been reorganized into several distinct pieces (each in a distinct namespace)
    • VisioAutomation – the core low-level library – I don’t expect people to spend much time using this directly
    • VisioAutomation.Scripting – if you are writing interactive tools that work with Visio then this is the part of the library that will make using controlling Visio much easier
    • VisioAutomation.DOM – This one is a document-oriented API to control Visio – consider it low-level, you generally don’t need to interact with it
  • The tools have been reorganized
    • Visio Power Tools – this provides some extra features to Visio (such as Exporting to XAML) and the ability to create really nice gradients
    • VisioInteractive - (Experimental) A library meant for use by an interactive IronPython 2.0 session
    • VisioPS - (Experimental) an Module for IronPython 2.0 that lets you control Visio from the command line

 

FUTURE PLANS

  • VisioPS will be pulled into its related project I am working on – I haven’t finished with the concept but essentially think of it is a “simple business intelligence & analytics from the command-line” – the idea is to make it easy to play and render human-scale data
  • VisioAutomation – evolutionary changes
  • VisioAutomation.XML – A library to create Visio .VDX files directly from C# without having Visio installed (yes, it’s possible and it’s not even that hard)

PARTING THOUGHTS

  • Even if you aren’t interested in using the code for the library, check out the Visio Power Tools add-in – it add some nice end-user features.