Interesting Blog With Cool Visio Topics

Saveen Reddy works on security in the Microsoft Forefront team, and has a very interesting blog. He has no Visio-specific responsibilities within MS, but graphics and visualization are among his hobbies. This interest has produced some very interesting posts about Visio. Have a look, and enjoy!

Most of his Visio-related posts have occurred this year, and I’ve tried to list them all here. Of course, the web is never static, and Microsoft employees never sleep, so check his blog every so often or get the RSS feed. There are some beautiful graphically-related non-Visio posts there too! Read:

Saveen Reddy’s blog

Saveen has created the AutoVisio library that simplies working with the Visio 2007 using C#. The libraries aren’t any kind of official release, but the code is available to the public “As-Is”. You can download it from CodePlex. It requires Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, and .NET Fx 3.5. If you don’t have those, you can always just look at the C# files. I was able to include the compiled .dll from this download in a Visual Studio 2005 project and get the methods to work, but perhaps that’s playing with fire 🙂

By the way, the Visio diagram that accompanies the project has some really cool visuals! Read:

Automating Visio 2007 with AutoVisio – now on CodePlex

There was some experimentation with creating an Office-2007-style Ribbon UI for Visio. The code is, by the author’s own admission, “throw-away code”, but you might find it useful, nonetheless. See these posts:

Adding a Ribbon to Visio

Sample code for Visio Ribbon Add-In

 

 

Update on my demo ribbon for Visio 2007

This post shows the interesting possibilities that Visio gradient fills and transparency offer. It also demonstrates some code that makes use of the his AutoVisio libraries. Read:

Advanced Gradients with Visio 2007 and Visual Studio 2008

If you want to sneak a peek at the inner-workings of Microsoft product development, then you’ll find this post interesting. It also has an interesting Sankey-style Visio diagram (that you can download) which illustrates the Long March to Zero Bugs.

Breaking down a mountain of bugs

And the rest: slightly more obscure, but Visio-related nonetheless!

Simple F# interop with Visio example

A Preview of Embedding IronPython into Visio 2007

Automating Visio with IronPython to Generate nice, consistent gradients