VSTO For Dummies

Chapter 12. Developing for Visio

In This Chapter

• Discovering the myriad development options with Visio

• Developing a Visio add-in using VSTO

• Finding out what the Visio Object Model can do

Few people know that Visio is a phenomenal development platform, with a vibrant community and a number of coding options. You can do a lot with databases and Visio diagrams without doing a stitch of code, and adding a little VBA to the mix makes Visio a surprisingly powerful tool.

What Visio does so well is, unsurprisingly, visualization. Visio helps the end user get a visual grip on a whole host of things, from software to bridges to networks to department hierarchy.

Like most people, you probably use Visio to design data schemas, UML diagrams, and user interfaces. Maybe you do flowcharts and network diagrams, too. What we didn't know until recently is that Visio can use all kinds of information to generate these kinds of diagrams — and a lot more — for the user, on the fly.

Add the ability to insert Visio into other programs as an ActiveX control, and you have a formidable environment. Add insertion to a complete managed API, and you have a Visualization Toolset.

Visio provides a boatload of diagramming power. VSTO provides a mechanism for harnessing it in managed code. If your users need to see something, and your .NET code can see it, Visio can provide a window into it.

In this chapter, we look into Visio extensibility, focusing (of course) on VSTO. Then we check in with the object model, accessible ...