Developing Microsoft Visio Solutions (Pro-Documentation)

Rating:
Summary: Old faithful - The best Visio developer reference book
Review: Don't let the modern-looking cover fool you. This book has been around for almost every version of Visio, and has been continually updated for every subsequent product release.

This is the quintessential reference book for Visio developers. A complete ShapeSheet and Object Model reference, this book will cover every object, method, property, event, and ShapeSheet formula you would ever want to know. In particular, much attention is paid to creating "SmartShapes", meaning using less "code", but taking advantage of the ShapeSheet and it's power to create highly intelligent Visio shapes. While most coders jump right in to coding, they do not realize that in Visio, good applications start with "shapes first", then "code later".

This book doesn't cover automating Visio's extra dll's and vsl's, like the UML, Organizational Chart, and Database Modeling solutions, but those add-ons are not really part of Visio's native object model (you'll have to dig a little harder for info of those).

Rating:
Summary: Good Developer Overview
Review: I found that this book touches on just about everything Visio is capable of doing. The depth of writing does seem lacking at times, however there is usually enough to get started if you look at examples from the code libarary and Visio shapes. If you don't mind soft copies, this exact text with code examples can be downloaded free from Microsoft as Visio 2002 SDK.

Rating:
Summary: A good starting point for VBA Development
Review: This is a good starting reference source for anyone interested in doing more advanced VBA development with Visio. This is not a book for the average Visio user who wants to use Visio as a presentation tool like Powerpoint.

This book lays the foundation for using Visio as an automated development tool, it introduces many of the advanced features of Visio and provides some samples. You need to have a solid understanding of VBA before you use this book.

The overall quality of the book is good. Samples are good, it has a CD that includes all samples, so you can cut and paste. The only negative that I have about the book is that it does not go into enough detail with the Visio VBA properties or the Visio Object Model.

This book is very much like a sampler platter. It gives you a little bit about everything. It is 10 feet wide and 2 feet deep. Needless to say, this book is still better than most that are available on Visio and VBA. There is another book that might be of interest to you and seems to have much compliment from other developers. Look for book by Graham Wideman.