Visio Constants in VisioBot3000

One of the great things about doing Office automation (that is, COM automation of Office apps) is that all of the examples are filled with tons of references to constants. A goal of VisioBot3000 was to make using those constants as easy as possible. I mentioned the issue of having so many constants to deal …

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Voodoo PowerShell – VisioBot3000 Lives Again!

Back in January I wrote a post about how VisioBot3000 had been broken for a while, and my attempts to debug and/or diagnose the problem. In the process of developing a minimal example that illustrated the “breakage”, I noticed that accessing certain Visio object properties caused the code to work, even if the values of …

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Debugging VisioBot3000

The Setup Sometime around late August of 2016, VisioBot3000 stopped working.  It was sometime after the Windows 10 anniversary update, and I noticed that when I ran any of the examples in the repo, PowerShell hung whenever it tried to place a container on the page. I had not made any recent changes to the code. …

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VisioBot3000 Settings Import

It’s been a while since I last spoke about VisioBot3000.  I’ve got the project to a reasonably stable point…not quite feature complete but I don’t see a lot of big changes. One of the things I found even as I wrote sample diagram scripts was that quite a bit of the script was taken up …

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Translating Visio VBA to PowerShell

In working on VisioBot3000, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at VBA in Visio’s macro editor. It’s one of the easiest ways to find out how things work. I thought it would be fun to take some VBA and convert it to PowerShell to demonstrate the process. We’ll start with a basic diagram using …

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Introducing VisioBot3000 – Part 2 (Superman?)

In the last post I showed you how VisioBot3000 makes drawing simple Visio diagrams simpler by wrapping the Visio COM API and providing more straight-forward cmdlets do refer to stencils and masters, and to draw shapes, containers, and connectors on the page. To be honest, that’s where I was expecting to end up when I started …

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Introducing VisioBot3000 – Part 1 (Clark Kent)

For a while now, I’ve been demonstrating Visio automation in PowerShell. For the most part, the posts have included a bunch of short code snippets designed to illustrate simple concepts. Unfortunately, the code has been filled with “magic” constants, and lots of method calls on the various Visio COM objects. Both of those make code …

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