• Illustration: ShapeStudio Design Environment

Two recently released toolkits for Visio 2003, the latest version of Microsoft's business and technical drawing product, cater to network designers and software developers. The Visio 2003 Resource Kit for IT Professionals delivers tools for network equipment discovery and diagramming that mirror a now-discontinued Microsoft offering, while the Visio 2003 SDK delivers many new tools for creating specialized design solutions on the Visio engine. Network design and custom solutions have both been important niches for Visio, and Microsoft hopes the kits will entice customers in those niches to upgrade to the latest version.

Resource Kit for Network Diagrams

The Visio 2003 Resource Kit for IT Professionals is a heavily discounted bundle of two third-party products for creating network diagrams, and it effectively replaces the discontinued Microsoft Visio Enterprise Network Tools. LAN MapShot from Fluke Networks enables discovery of network equipment and automatic construction of network diagrams in switched LANs. Altima NetZoom delivers more than 20,000 physical network shapes to aid rack layout and port-level network equipment diagrams.

Both products will prove useful in small organizations that don't have a full network discovery and monitoring product such as Hewlett-Packard’s OpenView, but could also find use in larger organizations for preliminary designs and ad hoc diagrams.

Note that despite the similarity in naming, this kit is different from the Visio 2003 Resource Kit, which delivers tools such as Group Policy templates for deploying and configuring Visio 2003.

SDK for Custom Applications

The Visio 2003 SDK, like earlier versions, delivers tools for developers that use Visio as a platform for custom design solutions, such as Carrier's ComfortDRAW solution for heating and air conditioning system design. The most prominent new tool is ShapeStudio, an integrated design environment for custom Visio shapes. (See the illustration "ShapeStudio Design Environment".)

The SDK delivers a number of tools other than ShapeStudio, including the following:

• A Print ShapeSheet utility for printing items from the internal ShapeSheet database, which includes rules and properties that control a shape's behavior
• A Solution Publishing tool for adding Visio components to Windows Installer packages
• An Event Monitor tool for logging events in a Visio document, which can help developers identify which events their own code needs to catch.

Requirements, Availability, Resources

Both the Resource Kit for IT Professionals and the SDK require Visio 2003, which in turn requires Windows 2000 or Windows XP. Both have some features that require SQL Server or the Microsoft SQL Data Engine (MSDE).

The Visio 2003 Resource Kit for IT Professionals costs US$18.95 plus shipping and handling through June 30, 2004, and can be ordered at microsoft.order-9.com/visiopro.

The Visio 2003 SDK is free, and can be obtained at the Visio Developer Center, www.msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/visio.