Visio: Preparing for a new VisioAutomation Release
I’ve been deliberately keeping quiet about some of my latest Visio work, but I wanted to shed a little light before my latest code is available in “beta” form. In summary, I released VisioAutomation 1.0 (ver 1.1.1) in early 2009, but since then I’ve been significantly updating the code for for a 2.0 release very soon.
Key updates:
- Scripting
- Much better support for scripting Visio via IronPython - The “VisioInteractive” command shell has seen some significant improvements and feature additions
- PSVisio – major enhancements to Powershell via PSVisio –which is a Powershell 2.0 module
- A simple example of a Powershell script
- PS> import-module .\PSVisio.Dll
- PS> New-Visio
- PS> New-Document
- PS> Draw-Rectangle 1 1 3 4
- PS> Set-Fill –FgColor -0xff0000
- Both VisioInterative and PSVisio go through a simple scripting layer called VisioAutomation.Scripting – so they share the same code. But, before I release 2.0 I am exploring Having VisioInterative also go through the Powershell cmdlets.
- Many more Unit Tests & Demos
- Visio Power Tools Add-In
- Core Automation Library
- It’s become much simpler – in the sense that it does no “wrapping” of Visio’s automation.
- The higher-level convenience code for building tools and scripting has moved to the Scripting layer
- New source location
- x64 compatibility
- After moving my dev workstations to Windows 7 x64 I discovered a couple of implicit dependencies on x86 Systems. Those dependencies have been replaced so everything will work on both platforms.
As soon as Windows 7 RTMs I’ll post the but until, but until then you can download the source.
