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Visio at the Microsoft Office System Developer Conference 2005

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Last week, Microsoft hosted the Microsoft Office System Developer conference, the first ever developer conference solely targeted at the Office developer last week. I presented a well-attended session called “Programming the Visio Graphical Platform,” demo-ing the Visio flowchart and treeview applications from the Visio 2003 SDK and talking in more detail about some of the best practices that I’ve covered in this blog. About 50% of the audience was existing Visio developers. In an ad-hoc show of hands, about three-fourths of the room was interested in managed code development, which was pretty cool since we focused on managed code coverage in our most recent version of our SDK.

 

It was a great crowd! There were lots of questions afterwards, including:

  • “Do you have any Visio-specific developer conferences?” (Answer: “No, but it is something we can look into. It’s a request I’ve heard more often in the last two years.”)
  • “Do you have any out-of-the-box integration with Information Bridge Framework?” (Answer: “Not today, but it is something we are looking into. It’s a natural fit and I’m going to start digging into this in the next month or so”)
  • “Do you need Visio on the machine to use the control in a SharePoint Web part?” (Answer: “Yes, the Visio application is always required to use the Visio drawing control. If you don’t have the Visio application on the box, your app will show the big grey box for an ActiveX control that does not initialize.”)
  • “What is the difference between the drawing control and the Viewer?” (Answer: “The drawing control provides the full edit functionality of the Visio drawing application in an ActiveX control and requires the Visio client application. The Viewer allows a user to view a Visio file without the Visio on the client machine.”)

 

I wish I had more time in the session to talk about Visio XML development. If anyone from my talk sees this, check out the XML blog entries for some information about how to use Visio in an XML-based application.

I spoke with a number of developers after the show, and it was very interesting to hear just how many scenarios involve Visio as a business process/workflow designer or workflow status display scorecard.

I’ll be presenting again at Tech Ed in Orlando in June 2005. If any readers are planning on going to that show, I always love to meet after the talk and learn more about the context of your solutions. Hearing about your scenarios, problems, and solutions helps us prioritize and build the right features for the next release. Plus, it makes my job a ton of fun to connect real scenarios with real people.

 

Thanks to everyone who attended the talk!

Mai-lan

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