Bill Morein's Weblog

(Relatively) New blog with lots of great Visio content

wmorein — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 00:51:00 GMT

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

Top 5 Visualizations of 2008

wmorein — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 20:28:00 GMT

For those more generally interested in Data Visualization, this is an interesting post: http://flowingdata.com/2008/12/19/5-best-data-visualization-projects-of-the-year/

Visio Conference presentation on upcoming version of Visio

wmorein — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 23:41:00 GMT

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)

Visio Conference 2008 - Agenda now posted

wmorein — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 02:42:00 GMT

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.

Visio SharePoint Stencils

wmorein — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 22:06:45 GMT

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.

Solution Performance Tip 1 – GetFormulas and SetFormulas

wmorein — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 01:12:00 GMT

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

100 Shapes

1000 Shapes

Individual Get

0.11 sec

0.36

GetFormulas

0.01 sec

0.11

Individual Set

0.31 sec

0.63

SetFormulas

0.01 sec

0.20

External Executable

100 Shapes

1000 Shapes

Individual Get

0.45 sec

4.3 sec

GetFormulas

0.03 sec

1.9 sec

Individual Set

0.17 sec

14.3 sec

SetFormulas

0.14 sec

0.5 sec

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.

Announcing (a bit belatedly) the Visio Conference 2008

wmorein — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 06:20:00 GMT

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.

Ribbon Baseball Widget for Word 2007 (built using VSTO)

wmorein — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 19:54:00 GMT

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.

Visio Active Directory Topology Diagrammer

wmorein — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:24:00 GMT

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:

More breakdowns of visualization techniques

wmorein — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 18:48:00 GMT

Coding Horror has a good post summarizing a number of breakdowns similar to the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods that I covered in an earlier post.

	100 Shapes	1000 Shapes
Individual Get	0.11 sec	0.36
GetFormulas	0.01 sec	0.11
Individual Set	0.31 sec	0.63
SetFormulas	0.01 sec	0.20