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Visio

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The Importance of the 2-Dot Rule in Visio Addins

First of all, I must say that I was unaware of this rule for many years, and that is probably because I started programming Visio in VBA back in the mid ’90s. VBA is built in to Visio like other Microsoft Office applications, and as such, it has a direct uninterrupted access to the Visio Api. It is very chatty by nature, and has immediate access to all the events in the Visio Api. Therefore there is little extra cost in using multiple nested reference to Visio objects, however VSTO Addins do not have this luxury, and the C# code gets access via the .Net Framework. This is an extra layer that calls to the Visio Api need to go through, and these calls need to cross the COM boundary multiple times if the they are chained together with more than 2-dots. So what does that mean in practice? Well, every crossing of this boundary takes time, and it all adds up. So, I asked AI to explain more about the importance of abiding by the 2-dot rule….

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Introducing a free Visio Report Runner application

AI is changing the world and how we should approach it. So I decided to see if I could get Claude Sonnet 4.6 Agent to completely write an application for me, and I mean completely. The application is written in Python by Claude, and I have not written a single line. The code is available at github.com/davidjpp/Visio-Report-Runner/ and it enables any Windows user, with Microsoft Excel installed, to run some types of reports from any Visio document (*.vsdx).

  • First, select a Vissio document
  • Displays the Visio preview image
  • Report definitions list
  • Simpple instructions
  • Saving an Excel report
  • Example list of qualifying items
  • Selecting a report definition and page
  • Example Summary report
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Protecting the integrity of custom Visio masters

All of my Visio solutions contain custom masters because this is the best way to create smart shapes that respond to user’s needs. This usually means creating Shape Data, User-defined Cells and Action rows that govern aspects of the shape with formulas designed to provide an efficient user interface. As a developer I sometimes forget that other users may not perform the same actions as I do, and can accidently undo all my intended behaviour. For example, in recent testing of a visual stream mapping system that I am working on, my carefully constructed master-shape relationship was being broken by grouping some of them together, thus changing their behavior and hiding them from some of the custom functions. The reason given was to that they want to create copies and this seemed like a reasonable way to do it. Now, I have known that this is bad ever since my original Visio developer training back in 1996, so I always avoid doing this, and erroneously thought that other would know this too. I was wrong to be so myopic, so I explored how I can best prevent this and other user actions that could break the intended master-shape relationship.

  • Multiple instances of a single master shape
  • Locking some properties of the shape
  • Modifying group behaviour
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Docked Stencils in Visio for the Web

Visio desktop has multiple ways to specify the folder where docked stencils can be found, but, as far as I am aware, Visio for the Web only has one. I mostly create VSTO add-ins for Visio desktop, and I use Visio desktop as a studio for creating templates for Visio for the Web. Often, I leave the Document Stencil in the template open because users can then drag and drop from there, but when I create an installation with custom stencils then they normally go into the application folder, or a sub-folder of it. An alternative is to install them into the My Shapes folder in the users desktop Documents folder. These will appear in the Visio desktop UI. Also, there is the ability to set the Stencils folder using File | Options | Advanced | File Locations. Finally, the desktop edition will always first check the folder that the Visio document is in for any docked stencils. Visio for the Web does not have all these options, so how do you get any custom docked stencils to appear when you use Visio for the Web to edit a document?

  • Visio desktop with docked stencils
  • Visio web viewer
  • Visio for the web with missing stencils
  • Visio for the web with stencils
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My Visio Books and Old pre-C# Work

We, as a family, are in the process of de-cluttering our house for hopefully a move closer to the south coast, so I decided to take a photo of my Visio books collection, and as you can see, back in the mid-1990’s, I started reading and learning from other peoples works, and then progressed to writing my own from 2007. This shows how mature the Visio desktop product is, and as very little has been removed, then each book has something to learn.

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Creating Boolean Context Menus in Visio

Over the many, many years that I have been creating Microsoft Visio solutions, I have had to create numerous right-mouse context menus for shapes to control their Shape Data values. Over that time, patterns emerge, so this article is highlighting three different appearances for simple Boolean values, otherwise known as True/False or Yes/No values, and even for tristate Yes/No/Maybe. In fact, Visio presents you with Boolean as one of the eight types of data available on the Define Shape Data dialog, but there is no UI for creating accompanying right-mouse context menus except for the ShapeSheet window. However, I will show that using a Fixed List type is often preferable to a simple Boolean type.

The Define Shape Data dialog
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