Earlier this morning, Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft’s Business Division formally kicked off the launch of Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010. The virtual launch event showed off a bunch of demos, customer testimonials, and interviews with Microsoft product managers. You can still see the virtual launch events over at http://www.the2010event.com . Visio 2010 and the rest of the Office products are now available to all of our business customers, and we’re...

Along with the Visio 2010 Release to Manufacturing , we are also pleased to announce that the Visio 2010 SDK and Visio 2010 Viewer are now available for download. The Microsoft Visio 2010 Software Development Kit (SDK) contains developer documentation, sample applications, and other tools to help developers create custom solutions for Visio 2010. Since the release of the Visio Beta SDK , we have made a number of improvements to the SDK: most notably, we have updated the documentation in the SDK and...

As mentioned in the last post, Visio 2010 has reached the Release to Manufacturing milestone. The product team has spent the last several months incorporating your feedback from the Beta and refining the product. A large community of customers, partners, and MVPs has contributed to this effort. More than 500,000 people have downloaded the Visio 2010 Beta release, and the feedback has been very positive. People have commented on the blog, sent e-mail, submitted Send-A-Smile reports, logged crash reports...

Today Microsoft announced that Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Project 2010 and Visio 2010 have released to manufacturing! As noted last month , Visio 2010 and the rest of the other Office 2010 products will be available to businesses worldwide on May 12 th and to consumers online and on retail shelves this June . Many thanks to everyone who provided product feedback on our blog and through our Send a Smile tool in our Visio 2010 Beta. Your feedback has helped us ensure a high quality...

As we get ready for next month ’s launch of Visio® 2010, we’re ready to announce that Visio 2010 will be available in three different editions. This post explains the differences between the three editions (and also gives you a sneak peak of what our boxes will look like!) Visio Standard 2010 Simplify complexity with a diverse set of intuitive and professional tools for diagramming. Visio Professional 2010 Bring your diagrams to life with dynamic, data-driven visuals that are connected...

Some of the earliest adopters of Visio were engineers and others who created technical drawings, and they loved the combination of power and simplicity that Visio provides. One of the most ubiquitous applications used by engineers is Autodesk’s AutoCAD, and Visio supports AutoCAD files by providing basic CAD integration features for import, conversion, and export. While we made significant CAD improvements in Visio 2007, we did not provide support for newer AutoCAD file formats. This meant...

Last week on the Office Engineering Blog , Microsoft confirmed the release dates for Visio 2010, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, and Project 2010. We’re happy to announce that Visio 2010 and the rest of the Office suite will release to manufacturing (RTM) next month. For businesses, Visio 2010 and the rest of the Office 2010 products will be available worldwide on May 12 th . For consumers, Office 2010 and Visio 2010 will be available online and on retail shelves this June . Until then, you can...

In previous posts we've introduced Visio Services and shown you how you can publish your Visio diagrams to SharePoint. We've also given you a quick introduction on how to install and configure Visio Services . In this post, we'll cover more details for IT Administrators about running Visio Services in SharePoint 2010. This post contains lots of links to detailed documentation on TechNet as well as other blog posts. Overview Visio Services is implemented as a service application in SharePoint Server...

When we talk to developers to get their feedback on the Visio development platform, a common request we hear is the ability, through the API, to control the settings used when exporting a diagram as a raster image in the PNG, JPG, BMP, or TIFF format. Typically, they want to automate the export of the pages in a document as images for use in a web page or other application that requires certain settings. In this post, we’ll talk about the additions to the Visio 2010 object model that let developers...

When Office 2007 was introduced, a new UI paradigm was adopted, and so was a new UI extensibility model, the RibbonX (Ribbon extensibility) model. RibbonX is a XML markup that allows developers to customize the Office UI. It enables 3 rd party developers and solution providers to build custom tabs and groups on top of the Ribbon, and target scenarios unique to and optimized for their customers. As Visio 2010 adopts the Fluent UI, Visio developers now also have the opportunity to utilize this platform...