Microsoft publishes and updates enterprise architecture icons on a routine basis. Earlier, these used to be images that can be easily used in tools like Visio, PowerPoint, etc. to create relevant architecture diagrams for solutions. Microsoft has shifted from providing Visio stencils in favor of more application generic Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) icons for Azure services and configuration items.
SVG's can easily be imported into Visio and due to the file format supporting faster scaling with no loss of image quality these icons work great. Like most others, I was also doing a drag and drop of the SVG Icon that I needed in Visio until renaming all icons to longer hyphenated strings and numbers caused me to look for an easier way to do this instead of doing a complex search and then drag and drop.
In order to make all your Azure architecture icons available within the Visio, we just need to follow the below-mentioned simple set of steps.
Step 1 - Download the latest Azure Icon Stencil
- Navigate to the following GitHub Repo - https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design
- Download the repo,
- This will download a zip file.
Step 2 - Unzip Icons & Move them
- Unzip the downloaded zip file.
- This would give us the files as depicted below,
- From this set, we are just interested in all the files with extension .vssx
Step 3 - Configuring Visio
- Navigate to the local folder "C:\Users\<UserName>\Documents\My Shapes"
- Copy all the files with extension .vssx.
- Paste the Icons folder in "My Shapes" folder,
Step 4 - Testing Visio
- Launch Visio application and navigate to "My Shapes" option as depicted in the snapshot below,
- You should be able to see all the files imported into it. Now select the icon set that you want to use. Once you click on the icon set, all icons will load in the left panel as depicted below,
That's it. Visio is now ready to use with all the Azure icon sets. This certainly helped me and now I don't have to look in my folders to get icons. I can get it directly from Visio and even use the search within Visio to find something I need.