Developing Visio Solutions with VB

 

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On Monday 24th April 2006 I gave a presentation to the Visual Basic User Group (VBUG) entitled "Developing Visio Solutions with VB". My main motivation was the belief that Visio is much underrated as a development platform and, while our use of Visio has been for rather specialist applications such as HarnWare and HarnVis, I believe Visio could be used for many other applications especially as it is perhaps the most programmer friendly CAD system we've used.

For those wishing to learn more about Visio from a programmer's perspective, the following books, SDK, web sites etc should provide a good starting point.

Books

  1. "Developing Microsoft Visio Solutions" (DVS) published by Microsoft Press in 2001 and which is now available on the MSDN web site. This book doesn't include any vb.net and it's written for Visio 2002. For some reason Microsoft didn't get around to updating this book for Visio 2003 which is a shame because a lot changed for developers between Visio 2002 and 2003 and there has been a DVS book for every other version of Visio I’ve used including Visio 3, 4, 4.5, 5, 2000 and 2002.
  2. "Visio 2003 Developers Survival Pack" by Graham Wideman. This is an excellent book which includes some C# but unfortunately no vb.net.

Both books are useful as Graham builds upon, rather than repeating the information contained in DVS. The VBA and VB6 code in both books is relatively easy to convert into vb.net.

Also of some relevance is “.Net Development for Microsoft Office” by Andrew Whitechapel published by Microsoft in 2005. The “Microsoft Office Visio 2003 Inside Out” book is more for users than developers.