Stencil file growing to Unreasonable size!

[Torbjörn Josefsson]

Our company makes a pretty complex product (a logic rule editor/generator) in
Visio - connecting shapes to VBA code in several ways, using customized VBA
dialogs for interaction

My problem (or rather, one of them) is that the Stencil file (where the
Shapes and all the VBA code and dialogs are kept) for some reason suddenly
'swells' at times, for no reason that I can understand. -When I have noticed
this before I have exported all the code to a 'new' stencil and replaced the
old one, thereby losing a lot of (I guess) unneccessary ones and zeroes. -But
I think it's time to try and solve this, since this is an annoying process,
and it doesn't feel very proffessional

Normally the stencil is about 1 MB in size, but as I realized (yesterday)
that saving the stencil took an unreasonable amount of time I checked how big
it was - 26 MEGS!!

I then tried exporting and deleting the dialog I had been working on
recently (not very big, but containing a Microsoft Flexgrid 6.0 control,
which was the only thing novel about it), thinking it might have something to
do with that. - When exported, the .frx file for the form was.... 260 MEG
LARGE! - And I could just Forget about reincluding it in the project, since
Visio VBA complained about running out of memory

Sigh..

Does anyone have any similar experiences?
Any advice?

Regards
Torbjörn

 

[David Parker]

Advice that you probably don't want is to write an Addon or Addin, and
remove all VBA code from the stencil
VBA is great for prototyping, but I wouldn't want to release a product with
it ...

 

[Torbjörn Josefsson]

In retrospect - neither would I (distribute a big VBA app)

It's had advantages, though - keeping everything in the same place, ease of
development and tight integration, using event-hooks directly from the Visio
environment, etc.

The 'next big step- for the product will probably be an arcitectural rehaul,
probably away from Visio if possible, since it has a bit too many quirks for
my taste

Making an AddOn DLL might be a shorter step, of course..

Thanks for your reply - have a nice weekend!
Torbjörn