Bill Morein's Weblog

Somehow I had thought that I had already pointed people to Saveen Reddy's blog, but looking back through the archives I realized that I hadn't. Saveen doesn't work on the Visio team, but is a power user and knows a ton about visualization.

I'm a huge fan of Python the programming language, and he covers a lot of information on how to use Python with Visio, among other topics. Here is a recent series he started: http://blogs.msdn.com/saveenr/archive/2009/01/22/visio-ironpython-powershell-how-to-draw-nice-diagrams-from-the-command-line.aspx

In February this year, we held a Visio Conference at which we started to reveal some of the features in the upcoming version of Visio. There are a lot of presentations up at the main conference site, but I did two presentations that were specific to the new version. There is a lot of exciting stuff demoed, but some of the best includes Visio Services (web viewing of data connected diagrams) and a lot of new Process Management (e.g. BPM, Quality, Lean, Compliance) functionality that I think will be really important.

      Visualizing Information Work Today & Tomorrow (keynote presentation with Microsoft President Jeff Raikes)

      Visio Future Investments (more in depth presentation of the new features)

We've posted the agenda for the upcoming Visio Conference. This conference will be expanded significantly from the last one, which was more focused on partners. This version will include a lot more end user content.

One major note: we will be disclosing a lot of information about the next version of Visio, which promises to be a huge release for us. We are in the middle of coding right now (I'm actually already using a version for my day to day work) and are really itching to tell people about all of the great stuff. We'll cover the upcoming stuff in both keynotes and will have two full sessions about it as well. If you are at all interested in the future of Visio, don't miss this conference (of course we'll be talking about the present of Visio as well, so don't miss it either way). You can register at this link.

SharePoint has been getting a lot of attention recently, and I've seen a lot of requests for stencils to help manage its design and deployment. A former colleague pointed me to this post, which includes a stencil that allows you document site structure. The author is working on some additional SharePoint related stencils and includes pointers to stencils others have put together.

As always, a good place to start when looking for domain specific stencils is the download site our MVP's have put together.

One of the most frequent questions I get from partners and other readers of this blog is how to improve the performance of their solution. Usually the first step is to point them to these five performance tips, but I thought it would be interesting to quantify just how much of a difference some of these tips actually make in the real world.

It just so happens that the Visio SDK includes some relevant samples in the "Visio Code Samples Library" that we can use to evaluate this. To test this, I used (slightly modified) the "Get Many & Set Many Formulas" code example in the "Shapes" section. I ran this using two of the main ways of automating Visio using managed code (specifically C# in this case): VSTO and instantiating Visio from an external executable. The example drops shapes then sets and retrieves formulas in two different ways: one by one and using GetFormulas and SetFormulas. Here are the results of running the tests (average of 10 runs each):

VSTO

As you can see, moving to the GetFormulas/SetFormulas style (which minimizes the number of objects that are passed back and forth) has huge performance implications. This is particularly evident when using an external executable which instantiates Visio, since this now means that your calls to Visio must cross process boundaries, which is expensive (I'll cover this topic more fully in a future post).

Using GetFormulas/SetFormulas is a little trickier than just doing things one at a time, but is usually well worth the effort. The samples in the SDK are a great way to get started.

This has already been mentioned on some of the other Visio-related blogs, but I wanted to make sure that people are aware of the Visio Conference 2008, taking place here in Redmond in February of next year.

The last conference (held in February 2006) was a huge success, with some of the most favorable customer feedback I've ever seen. We're expanding this version, including additional sessions focused on end users along with even more sessions for developers and partners.

One interesting tidbit is that we will be giving you a sneak peak at the next version of Visio (creatively codenamed "Visio 14"). This promises to be an absolutely huge release for us, so we'll have a lot to show and discuss.

If you are at all interested in Visio, whether as a customer, partner, or solution integrator, I'd highly recommend making the trip.

It is baseball playoff time here in the US, so I wrote a Visual Studio Tools for Office 2008 beta add-in that lets you track games right inside the home tab of the Word 2007 ribbon. The add-in shows the score, inning, and base situation for games in progress, tracking them by pulling data from a MSN sports web service. More info here: Ribbon Baseball Widget.

One of the most common requests I get from IT users of Visio is for a way to draw out an Active Directory topology map. Visio has Active Directory shapes, but until now it didn't have the ability to actually go out and create a diagram from AD. We've put up a free download that does this -- the Microsoft Visio Active Directory Topology Diagrammer is now available. This runs as a separate application and is installed in the Start menu. Here is a screenshot of the UI:

I posted a while back about the new Data Mining Add-ins for Visio and Excel that were created by the SQL Server team. That is one of the more popular posts on this blog, so I know a lot of people have been downloading them. If you have, please note that there is a performance update to the Add-ins. This was released in April, so if you downloaded them after that you should be up to date. This also does not actually impact the Visio functionality -- the fixes were on the Excel side.

If you haven't already, make sure that you update any copies of Visio 2002 or 2003 with the security updates that we released last month. If you use Microsoft Update or Office Update (highly recommended) then you will already be updated, but if not you can download the files directly from the following links:

• Security Update for Visio 2002
• Security Update for Visio 2003

Somehow I missed the fact that Visualizing Information with Microsoft Office Visio 2007, a new book by David Parker, has been published. I knew that the book was coming out, but somehow the actual release slipped by me. I've had a number of people ask about good books for learning about real world uses of the new data features in Visio 2007, and I highly recommend this book for that reason.

David is one of our most active and insightful MVPs, and he has written a great book that comprehensively covers how to work with data in Visio. One of the best things about the book is that it not only covers the new features, but also has a lot of tips about how to best incorporate earlier product features into your overall solution.