New Visio training videos

Today I’m releasing a new training course on Channel 9. The course is aimed at developers who are new to Visio, but need a quick overview of how Visio works under the covers.

The course is split into two parts:

Concepts not details

As is the case with a lot of software the available information and content tends to be cumulative and the concepts either become assumed knowledge or more difficult to discover. So with this course I wanted to cover the foundations of Visio development and the basic choices when considering extensibility.

To that end I’ve intentionally not taken a walkthrough approach, but rather have tried to cover all of the concepts so that you have some structure to store the detail that’s available throughout the official documentation and the many blog posts out there (including my own).

The breakdown of the course is as follows:

Shapes, Stencils and Templates

Structure - file types and the basic mechanics of shapes within a document
Shape logic - parametric behavior, formulas and inheritance
Data - Shape Data section, Data Linking and Data Graphics
Relationships - Glue and structured diagramming
Layout - Built-in layout and routing

Code and Extensibility

Extensibility choices - VBA, C# (Addins), C++ (Addons), Visio Drawing Control and PowerShell
Object model
Event handling
Deployment

There’s a few areas that I decided not to cover, and that’s Visio Services, OpenXML file format and the Visio Viewer. These all offer great opportunites for extensibility but, I think, sits outside of the ‘foundations’ scope that I’ve tried to put this course into.

Current state

One final point is that a number of the concepts that I’ve covered, in particular the Extensibility Choices, have been around for quite a few years, so bear in mind that this represents the current state of Visio extensibility as it stands today (26th April 2016).

Feedback

This is my first video that I’ve produced and if you have any feedback (good or bad), I’d love to hear it in the comments on YouTube.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the course.