Parallel programming

[Roger]

Hi all

One of our programs has to extract data from Visio documents containing
large numbers of shapes and connections between those shapes. This process is
too slow.

I’ve been developing software for Visio since version 3 in 1995 and until
recently we’ve had the luxury of increasingly faster computers to get us out
of this type of problem. Now it seems the only solution will be parallel
programming to take advantage of multi-core processors.

Are there any plans to provide multi-threaded capabilities in the Visio API?
I guess providing multi-threaded capabilities for operations that modify
Visio documents could be difficult. However, in this case all that is
required is a read-only multi-threaded capability. This would enable us to
divide the shapes in a page by the number of processors on the user’s
computer so that each processor could analyse the batches of shapes in
parallel.

Best regards
Roger Billsdon

 

[geejay]

Have you tried launching X processes of Visio (not sure if you can even do
that with add-ins, maybe launch two versions of the add-in?, would be
interested to see if that at all can work?).

In theory you could produce X pages, and then save and merge the files
somehow? Just an idea, never really thought about it before.

Anyway, here are some tips that you've probably already seen:

http://blogs.msdn.com/mailant/archive/2004/09/22/233082.aspx