The new Visio introduces a new XML-based file format, VSDX. In a previous post, we provided an overview of the new file format. One benefit of the new file format is its interoperability: it is now much easier to work with the default file format outside of Visio. In this post, we provide some tips for working with the new file format programmatically.

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Over the last few months, we’ve been posting about the new Visio – discussing features in depth and introducing the editions that will be available. Before we get started on a new series of posts, we thought it would be helpful to summarize our existing content – while the material was written for the Visio Customer Preview, it applies to the released version well.

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Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standard maintained by the Object Management Group which gives businesses the ability to understand their business processes using a graphical notation and to communicate these processes in a uniform manner. The basic BPMN shapes are similar to traditional flowcharting shapes, which makes modeling in BPMN easy for new users. For advanced users, the BPMN standard contains a large number of detailed shapes—more specialized versions of the basic shapes—which...

Our previous posts have discussed some of the great end user features we’ve added to the new Visio. For developers, the new Visio supports programmatic access for many of its new features. The new Visio API contains methods that let developers change shapes and pictures, add comments, duplicate pages, and apply themes.

In this blog post, we will introduce some of the new API by providing brief descriptions about the methods, properties, and objects. We will also see some of them in action using examples.

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Welcome to the new Visio Blog! Here you can learn all about the latest release of Microsoft Visio, which you can preview now!

Here you'll find answers to common questions, tips on getting the most out of Microsoft Visio, and customer success stories. As we share the latest information around Visio, you'll hear from members of the engineering team, our amazing customers, and the Visio MVPs.

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Lots of customers have told us that they want to exchange one shape with another without losing the text, connections and formatting.  The Change Shape feature in the new Visio gives you this functionality. In this post, we will review the Change Shape feature and talk about the implications of the feature on shape and solution developers.

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Are all the shapes in my diagram labeled? Do I have any loose connectors that are not attached to other shapes? We have heard from customers that it is often hard to answer these types of questions, especially in large diagrams. As a result, they spend a lot of time manually checking diagrams for errors. At the same time, they have to manually ensure that the different diagrams they create are visually consistent. We have also heard from companies that they want to enforce certain diagramming standards...

Visio has long been the tool of choice for documenting processes. Ever since the introduction of workflow support in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, we have been hearing from customers, “wouldn’t it be great to visualize SharePoint workflows in Visio like flowcharts? Wouldn’t it also be great to go from Visio business process diagrams to executable workflows on SharePoint?” In Visio Premium 2010, we have partnered with the SharePoint Designer team to bring you that...

For this blog post, we put together a list of some of our favorite Visio tips & tricks. Learn these to save time and improve the look of your diagrams. Quickly create evenly spaced shapes Let’s say you’d like to make a grid of shapes like the following: To create this, first make a copy of the individual shape (e.g. using Control+Drag): Then, press Control+Y to repeat that operation: In a similar manner, you can then copy this row multiple times to create a grid. Keep shapes aligned...

The video below shows how to add a Data Graphic legend to a drawing using C# code. How might you use this code within the context of constructing diagrams with Data Graphics? As mentioned in a previous blog post , Visio Professional 2010 and Visio Premium 2010 use container shapes to create legends for data graphics. Along with this new feature, the Visio 2010 Object Model includes new APIs that allow you to manipulate container shapes programmatically – including the Page.DropLegend method...