I am making a design document and I need to draw pictures using Visio. I have searched through the Internet, but there is no getting started guide or tutorial. Can somebody help? I need a tutorial which helps me to draw figures of moderate complexity.
At the surface, this looks like a fairly straightforward question, but I would argue that there are some underlying problems inherent in what you are looking for. There are a couple of ways to address this question:
First, how to use Visio.. Finding that information is fairly straightforward. The documentation via the Help menu is handy when trying to determine how to actually add elements, tie them together and define schemas based on those elements (be it an E-R diagram, UML, or some other architectural diagram). Finding the tutorials you are seeking might be difficult as Microsoft has moved Visio from a standalone product, to a part of the Visual Studio Suite, to part of the Office Suite, back to a standalone product. I would start my search on MSDN. Here are a few resources:
Visio Insight - A blog dedicated to using and modifying Visio
A portion of the Visio documentation
Second, how to you develop diagrams (and perhaps more specifically architectural diagrams). This falls outside of the realm of Visio and moves more towards fundamentals. There are a lot of books on UML and diagramming problem domains. I keep a copy of the UML Cheat Sheet handy. The same goes for E-R diagrams as well as other models.
And finally, with a question: What kind of diagrams are you trying to create? As with all tools, make sure that Visio is the right tool for the job. Would the table diagraming system in SSMS work for you? How about the class diagraming system build into Visual Studio? (and this is just assuming you are using Microsoft technologies in order to develop software). Visio is great for creating flowcharts and systems diagrams as well -- and those are much more straightforward.
As one final note, check out some of the samples that should be included. Here is a link to some (albeit older) sample for Visio that should get you started.
You can always read a book on the tool and that's my personal preference. I learned Visio 2010 by reading the book "Microsoft Press Microsoft Visio 2010 Step by Step"
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We just finished a small project with the primary aim of giving Microsoft StreamInsight a try.
The technology looks fine, but I have a concern about its industry traction. When we ran into issues there were only a handful of materials on the web and generally I miss a vibrant community around it.
Should we expand our use of StreamInsight or it will go down the drain in a few years like Silverlight did?
My opinion: it won't go the way of Silverlight.
Silverlight was, essentially, replaced by other technologies - specifically, HTML 5. StreamInsight doesn't have that. You are correct in that there isn't a whole lot around it. But that is because it's a relatively new technology that has a radically different paradigm, isn't very well known and has more limited use cases than something like ASP.NET MVC. But CEP is an initiative not just from Microsoft (with StreamInsight) but also Oracle, IBM and others. And as data volumes continue to increase, these technologies will be even more important.
I was at a SQL user group meeting about three months ago. I asked that exact question of the speaker (Microsoft Blue Badge). He didn't make a definitive statement but from what he did say it was clear he thought StreamInsight had a big future.
I want to generate C++ code from a State Diagram (Harrel FSM) and I'm wondering whether this is possible with EA, and if, how to go about generating code.
I've followed the example at Sparx: Generate From Behavioral Models, but when I look at the generated code it consists of skeleton code that does not include any state transitions etc. I've seen an example of assumedly code generated by EA in their online help, so it does seem to be possible, but I cannot find any concrete examples of how.
Could anyone give me some direction? Thanks.
Are you able to generate behavioral code from the examples in the EAExample model?
If not, you'll need to confirm which edition of Enterprise Architect you are using. Code generation from behavioral models such as State Machines is only available in the Business and Software Engineering, Systems Engineering and Ultimate editions of EA.
I have been looking around at web applications and websites with rich graphs, charts, and data visualization and for the most part have been able to determine which frameworks or tools websites are using. However I was looking over 'resumup.com' and couldn't determine what they are using. Does anyone know off hand or can you tell? It doesn't seem like any javascript framework i've seen unless its custom...is it some sort of flash or flex framework? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Marques
I apologize in advance for not being able to hyperlink everything. StackOverflow is placing a limit on the number of link I can put here. Had to shrink 9 links down to 2.
I'm not too familiar with ResumUP, so I can't speak directly to that. Though, since it is on Facebook, my guess is that it is almost certainly uses homebrewed, javascript-based visualization code.
Speaking more broadly to the web as a whole, and to the first part of your post, D3 is becoming the most popular option for web-based visualizations (particularly those that are interactive). An example of D3 that you've might have seen is The New York Times' 2013 budget visualization (and most other interactive visualizations on the NYT, for that matter). However D3 is capable of more than just making visualizations. Compare The New York Times example to Visual.ly's Inequality In America site, which is also made using D3.
For more basic visualizations like bar charts, many companies offer APIs for creating visualizations, like Google's Chart Tools. And even more don't use any toolkit. Take for instance the popular wind visualization tool by Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg. This website showing visualizations for the civil war only depends on jQuery for javascript code (and on the Google Maps API).
Other frameworks include, but are not limited to, Protovis (I'd use D3 instead), processing.js, and countless others.
I'm not sure if you have any plans on making web-based visualization tools, but if you do, I'd highly recommend using D3. There's a bit of a learning curve, but it gets you thinking about visualizations in terms of data, which can only help improve the quality of what you end up making. As an added benefit, D3 is one of the better toolkits in terms of how it treats the creation of visualizations. How you create and combine visual primitives in D3 is fairly natural. Not perfect, but definitely better than most alternatives.
Finally, on top of visualizations, the internet is abound with infographics (see Visual.ly's blog for examples). While these can theoretically be made with frameworks like D3, they are more likely than not made with Adobe Illustrator, saved as images, and then uploaded.
I have spent a lot of time recently looking for some resources to help me to learn some more advanced techniques for developing AX 2009 SSRS reports. There is a lot of information available about making basic reports and Microsoft provides some nice walkthroughs.
What I am looking for is some more in-depth information covering more about writing business logic and methods in C#. Where can I locate some Code samples or even a solid technical book?
I trust you have found the great videos from Saveen Reddy. There are dozen of great videos explaining also into details on how you go about to make AX 2009 SSRS reports:
http://www.youtube.com/user/dynamicsaxbi
Furthermore, I would highly recommend having a look at the already created report libraries. Start off with the libraries ending with SRS (Like CustSRS and VendSRS). Just rightclick a library and choose to edit it in Visual Studio. I assume your environment is already set up for this.
Look into how some reports use queries to collect data directly and some use datamethods. By examining what is already in standard, you can learn a great deal of how to solve your own requirements.
I have one advice to you:
To develop a neat looking SSRS report, use SharedLibrary already exist project and use its styles.
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I'm curious as to how many people are using Open XML (OOXML) these days (either pure or via the SDK) in closed and commercial environments. I'm fairly aware of what's going on on the 'public web' (MSDN, OpenXMLDeveloper.org, etc.), but am wondering about SO people's experience with it, both good and bad.
Are most people opting out of VBA and VSTO in favor of working directly with OOXML formats? What benefits are you getting from OOXML that you're not getting from the object model. I'd love to learn more about why you're using it or why you're not, what are you using it for, etc.
I'm just trying to get a feel from the community on OOXML as an approach toward document automation or other uses. I'm not finding community forums (this one or others) to be incredibly active with questions and users (check out the number of questions by tag of this post), so I'm wondering if I'm one of the very few who is using OOXML extensively.
Now that Microsoft Office 2007 (and especially Excel) support Open XML, I'm finding it far easier to work with than Office Automation. A few major reasons for this are:
Better performance;
No flakey IPC issues (i.e. somebody left Excel open at the Save As dialog, crash);
No dependency on Office itself, or any external components whatsoever;
Fairly easy to write Linq extensions and queries against in C#;
Can be used in server environments without any problems or risks.
Given that Office XP/2003 users can open Office 2007 files with the Compatibility Pack, I don't see any reason to continue using the old automation or "OfficeML" methods. It's a bit of a learning curve, but it's arguably the best option today - it's free, it's reliable, and best of all it's the native format used by Office 2007 today and you don't need any stupid tricks to get it to work (like attaching the XLS content-type to HTML as we did for XL2003, and having XL2007 complain about an incorrect extension).
I wouldn't say it's an outright replacement for VBA/VSTO - the thing about those is that they're usually part of a solution where the requirement is to integrate with the Office environment itself. Using OOXML would generally require you to write an entire application around it. But for simple import/export, which is probably what 90% of automation has been used for in the past, definitely, OOXML is the way to go.
Libraries like Simple OOXML can also greatly help with the learning curve.
We are using Open XML SDK for export to Excel. I have to say it is quite slow so we had to do some caching on our own (for shared strings). The library is just an object representation of the Open XML format. Sometimes it can be good thing, sometimes not. Especially when you have to know Open XML standard very well because the SDK won't handle anything for you. You have to know all the restrictions the format brings, you have to know which elements you cannot ommit in xlsx or docx, etc. It allows you to create inconsistent excel spreadsheets or word documents which is not good. Well, it's free at least :) Better than nothing.
I have used Open Xml SDK for document generation in SharePoint, PPTX generation for custom presentations (pulling from XSLX for the data) and for "building" composite documents from multiple document segments.
The format and the SDK are great. No worries on the server in ASP.NET or SharePoint scenarios, and great speed. I have not found too many scenarios where the SDK or "brute force" xml cannot accomplish a goal. One instance is password protection and DRM for documents, but these are more corner cases. I would agree with aaronaught that this is not an exclusive solution, but SharePoint, VSTO and others are tools in the tool belt for document generation solutions.
I am doing the scenario that sales performance for a country is delivered in PPT Deck using Open XML
I looked at this technology a lot, I program in VBA, but it was way way to complex for my needs. There are some great things about using it that my elearning would benefit from, like Linq and XML, but the bar for going from VBA to the underlying formats is just too high and I don't have the luxury of the kind of time and money it would take investing in learning VS.Net and Open Office XML formats.
But the one thing I think it would really help with is meta-tagging PowerPoint content for an LMS.
I've used it to parse pptx files, looking for special comments in shapes. These comments are links to other resources (uri's most often, PDF files, etc.). I then use deepzoom software to render the pptx and then render the uri's inside the shape. Fun, but slow. Use it to help with research and a "novel" way to look at posters. But this isn't LOB.
We migrated from Word Interop to Open XML very recently.
Our application is used for creating Invoices in the Word and pdf format. When Interop was used, a decent size Invoice took about 5-10 minutes to generate.
Now, using OpenXML and SSRS that time has been reduced to approximately 30 seconds.
The only problem area with Word was that some features were not backward compatible from Word 2010 to 2007 and that took some time to fix and get up and running. Like creating the Table of Contents, merging documents etc.
Other than that, I think Linq, MSDN and Eric White's Blog is enough to get you going in the right direction.