Best way to integrate Visio 2003 and .NET 2005?

[ha1o]

Hi, I have a situation and I hope someone can help me.

I'm trying to create a winForm project, and I need that this project present
to the user a window with some sort of a work area were the user could create
figures like circles or lines. pretty much what Visio does, but just the
basic things. Also, I need to save that information in files with Visio
format; things like that.

The problem is that I don't really have an approch, or how I'm going to do
that.

I'm going to use Visio 2003 Professional and Visual Studio .NET 2005
Professional. I know about the PIAs (Office Primary Interop Assemblies), but
I wanted to be sure there is not other better way to integrate .NET
application development with MS Visio (like a dll or an API) before I decide
to use the PIAs. Beside, I'm not even sure if I'll be able to draw Visio
objects in a .NET application using the PIAs.

thanks for time.

 

[Al Edlund]

Graham Wideman has an excellent book that covers some of the basics of
making these decisions (pointer over on John Marshall's site
www.mvps.org/visio). It sounds as if you do not want to do an add-in (i.e.
native visio linked to your code). You haven't mentioned what language you
want to code .net in (c++, c#, vb), there is an example of using the drawing
control with c# in the visio sdk available on MSDN. It doesn't matter which
approach you use (add-in vs activex), Visio is still installed on the
workstation although you do have some options on how much of a footprint you
want to take.

al

 

[ha1o]

Thks for the help. And I'll consider the add-in option.