I was interviewed by Microsoft when I was at the MVP conference in March. I rambled on about some of my experiences with Visio over the years. It has now been published for all to see here
In case you are wondering, the shirt was from the 1998 Visio Conference, which was pre-Microsoft. It’s probably time that I had a new wardrobe!
I went to see the latest version of Visio last week at Microsoft Campus in Redmond, but, as usual, chose to stay in Seattle because it is such a great city. I love to walk down to Pike Place market in the morning to ponder over which specialist food to select, or to smell the flowers as they are arranged for the day’s pickings. So, with a piroshky (Russian pastry) and coffee I strolled to the little park at the end to contemplate the day. The view across Puget Sound is fantastic and I wanted to capture it to share with my friends. I only have a handy little digital camera, but fortunately, I recently became aware of a handy little application called Microsoft Image Composite Editor (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ICE/ ) . MICE patches your photos together to make a larger panorama, and then you can export it into many different formats.
I have saved four panoramas for viewing using Deep Zoom in Silverlight 2.
My last post was only yesterday, when I released celMaker 2 for Visio 2007 and Excel 2007, but I have already had some feedback from my fellow Visio MVP, John Goldsmith. He found a couple of “bugs” and suggested an improvement, so they have all been implemented.
I was recently asked to provide a new version of celMaker that works with Visio 2007 and Excel 2007, so I got my old VB6 code out of SourceSafe and upgraded it so that I could run it on my Vista 64 laptop too. I also decided that I would release this version to the public as freeware because I have added no new features.So, what is celMaker? And where can you download it?
Last one first … you can download it from here : http://www.bvisual.net/products/celMaker/publish.htm (under review)
Most Visio users will have the components, so you can just click the Launch link.
celMaker is a developer(ish) tool for Visio which allows the most often used sections of a Visio ShapeSheet to be copied into an Excel spreadsheet, or from an Excel spreadsheet onto a Visio master.
This means that the Visio Shape designer can create one master with its Shape Data (nee Custom Properties), User Cells, Actions, Smart Tags, Controls and Connection Points, and then save this to an Excel spreadsheet for backup, verification, discussions, documentation or transfer to another Master.
The Excel spreadsheet can be created manually or by reverse engineering existing Visio masters.
celMaker is provided as a stand alone executable that requires both Visio and Excel to be running, and can be used for many different types of diagram projects.
All programs have bugs, but some bugs are more annoying than others. One such bug is the often missing ribbon UI in Excel when you generate a report from Visio. So, I was delighted when the Visio team informed me of the impending service pack 2 for Microsoft Office Visio 2007, and found that it includes a fix for this problem: ttp://blogs.technet.com/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2009/04/16/service-pack-2-for-the-2007-microsoft-office-system-due-to-ship-april-28th.aspx
So, what is this bug? Well, I often run reports straight from Visio using the rudimentary report writer:
For the past two years, I have been adding XAML-based projects to my collection, alongside the normal Visio libraries and automation code that I normally produce. The reason is quite simple : both environments have the ability of linking vector graphics and data together in an exciting, interactive and controllable way. There is a certain smartness to both with the ability to binding data to graphical appearance. XAML seems to be present in all of Microsoft’s graphic products, in the form of WPF, Silverlight .and Xps. Now, we know that there are great things to come viz-a-viz Visio and XAML in the next version, and there is Saveen Reddy,s excellent Visio Export to XAML project on CodePlex ( https://www.openhub.net/p/VisioExportToXAML ), but most people do not realise that Xps is XAML, but compressed.
