Background

Visio remains to this day an industry standard for the depiction of IT infrastructure from both a conceptual and design perspective, over the years I have built diagrams using Visio stencils created by Microsoft and the IT Tech community to convey my ideas accurately and effectively as design documentation.

Over a year ago I set out to locate current, up to date and relevant Visio stencils for Azure with the intent on building reference architecture patterns for Azure services that could be used as templates for design material. Unfortunately my search came up short and I found that Microsoft had 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 raster scaling with no loss of image quality these icons work great. The issue however when working with Visio is that functionality wise these icons are tedious to work with. Some examples of what I mean: -

• No connection points (when you draw a line from icon A to icon B, Visio will either attach the line to the icon edge or the center)
• No properly positioned text field (when adding descriptive text to the icon Visio will place the text at the center of the icon, requiring manual repositioning)
• Import size is dependent on the source SVG view box and scale (depending on the source file, when it is dropped onto a drawing it may need to be down\up sized to match the scale of other icons)
• Lack of programmability (having icons in a stencil allows you to leverage PowerShell or other languages to programmatically draw diagrams)

With these limitations and the lack of standardized up to date stencils I set out on a personal mission to build my own functional, relevant and as up to date as possible Visio stencil for anyone to use. With permission (and the only caveat that I maintain an up to date collection) from the Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise team to build an icon collection based on the publicly available icons, I built a fully programmatic method to build a stencil collection using SVG's as the source icons.

My process and methodology

Project ultimate goal

Function > Ease of use > Form

This is my driving factor behind this project. I know that others prefer drawing tools such as Draw.io but Visio offers an amazing amount of capability from a programmatic perspective. Icons need to not just be pretty images, they need technical function with the ability to be used easily. Proper stencil objects with pre-defined mathematically perfect placed connection points make drawing by hand or script so much easier. The icon itself although important is third on my priority list and will always remain so. I want these stencils to be as useful as possible while maintaining the relevance and breath of Azure services.

First a bit of history for this project

I started with a collection process, gathering as many useful and up to date SVG icons as possible and collating them in a folder with a descriptive naming convention and classification. I initially started by dragging an icon onto the Visio drawing canvas and then adding in connection points for North, East, South and West of the icon and moving the text box to the bottom of the icon. After that I scaled the icon using a guide background box to be either 20mm wide or 20mm high before dropping it into my stencil and entering in it's service name.

Now I am pretty good at performing mundane repetitive operations like this and with a few key bind mappings\macros on a gaming mouse I was able to process each icon in around 45 seconds. Problem was that I had 300 plus icons to work through. Initially I just sucked it up and processed each one manually, after just under four hours and at least 3,600 mouse clicks, I had a functional stencil.

However things started getting messy when Microsoft updated a huge collection of Azure Service icons a short while after I was finished that made my version irrelevant. So I looked for a better way to build this stencil, as I knew that that Microsoft would forever be adding new services to Azure and or refreshing current service icons (which is a good thing by the way!) and I just did not have the time or energy to perform a few thousand mouse clicks after each version update.

My method of building

Enter PowerShell and the Visio COM application method. If you review my version history below you will see that this project has evolved significantly since I started and I have built a full import and conversion process that performs the following.

1. Scans a build directory for SVG's and sorts a list of icons by name
2. Launches Visio as a COM application and performs a page drop for the SVG
3. Gets the current width and height of the icon and scales up or down until either the width or height of the icon is 20mm
4. Adds Shape data placeholders to support adding metadata when using PowerShell to enumerate Azure resources such as ResourceID for example
5. Adds connection points to the icon (North, East, South, West, South of Textbox, North East, South East, South West and North West)
6. Adds a slight drop shadow to the icon
7. Repositions the default text field to the bottom of the icon
8. Drops the icon into the main stencil and another copy into the by category stencil
9. Adds metadata to the stencil master such as Name, Hover, Search (Including the category and icon name)
10. Imports my drawing tools from a stencil
11. Sorts all of the imported icons into a grid for inspection and then export to PNG as a visual index for the stencil content
12. Exports out a high resolution PNG and SVG version of the now re-scaled icon for use in other applications
13. Saves everything to my GitHub Repo staging folder

With this process I can build and re-build over and over again in minutes and this allows me to keep this collection up to date and focus on adding more functionality.

SVG image of the current full stencil content

Some example images to show stencil functionality: -

Source SVG files

This is where I pick up the source SVG Files, using an _ as a delimiter this allows me to classify the type of icon for the grouping process.

Connection points

Exact connection points relative to the center of the icon

Connection point usage

Easily connect to and from the icon in multiple directions

Shape Data

Coming soon, super awesome programmatic diagram creation. Enumerating resources from Azure and then populating the resources into Visio and adding the relevant metadata to the shape. This unlocks a massive initiative I am working on which is a reverse of this. Design in Visio, add Azure metadata and then push the deployment to Azure via PowerShell.

Sponsorship

If you would like to support my development or just say thank you! Then check out my Sponsorship page:-

• https://github.com/sponsors/David-Summers

Stencil Usage

Download only what you need or the entire collection using the links below.

Option 1 - Download the single stencil file that contains all of the icons and drawing tools

• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/Azure_All-Icons_V-3.9.vssx

Option 2 - Download the latest full ZIP package containing all stencils, PNG and SVG versions.

• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/V-3.9.zip

Option 3 - Download just the category stencil files that you need

• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/Azure_AI_V-3.9.vssx
• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/Azure_Application_V-3.9.vssx
• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/Azure_Compute_V-3.9.vssx
• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/Azure_Data_V-3.9.vssx
• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/Azure_Deployment_V-3.9.vssx
• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/Azure_Drawing-Tools_V-3.6.vssx
• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/Azure_Dynamics-365_V-3.9.vssx
• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/Azure_Endpoint_V-3.9.vssx
• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/Azure_Generic_V-3.9.vssx
• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/Azure_Identity_V-3.9.vssx
• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/Azure_IoT_V-3.9.vssx
• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/Azure_Management_V-3.9.vssx
• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/Azure_Networking_V-3.9.vssx
• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/Azure_Office365_V-3.9.vssx
• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/Azure_Security_V-3.9.vssx
• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/Azure_Storage_V-3.9.vssx
• https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/raw/master/Azure_Workload_V-3.9.vssx

Option 4 - Don't use Visio?

You also have the PNG and SVG versions of the Icons, they have been scaled the same way as the stencil and can be used in other applications.

Installation

Download the stencil(s) and save to your "My Shapes" folder (normally under "C:\ Users \ %YourUserName% \Documents \My Shapes")

Special note on Search

A few versions ago I added search metadata to each icon, this was a massive feature add and really tricky to work out via the Visio COM. However after publishing this update I received heaps of feedback that search was not working. I posted a Twitter poll about this and surprisingly 50% responded that search was working!

This is a quirk of Visio going back to 2007 and I figured out the right combination of settings that "should" work for you.

First, ensure that your Windows Search service is actually running

Next, ensure that your Windows Indexing settings for VSSX files is enabled to index content as below.

Next, ensure your Shapes folder is enabled for indexing.

Next, ensure that Visio has the following setting under Shape Search to match on any word

Finally, and this was the main showstopper for many. Visio will only provide results if the Stencil is in English (United States) locale AND (This is the important bit) if you open a new document using US Units of measure then you will receive search results! Metric = No results :(

To assist in part with the above, in version 3.1 I changed the Stencil locale from English Australia to English United States. Hopefully the other suggestions above will get search working for you and as an example on my Windows 10 with Visio 2016 install, search is working for me.

Roadmap

See the open issues for a list of proposed features (and known issues).

Contact

Twitter is my primary communication method and if you would like to discuss this project, follow me for updates (Including my Azure News bot) or just talk tech in general then add me to your follower list. Alternatively you can do the same via LinkedIn.

• Twitter - https://twitter.com/Xeeva_D3
• LinkedIn - https://au.linkedin.com/in/djsummers

Version History

Current

Version 3.9 - 08/11/2021

Updated the collection with the new services announced at Microsoft Ignite this month as below

Category	Icon	Status
AI	Cognitive Services Language	New
AI	Machine Learning Studio Web Service (classic)	Updated
AI	Machine Learning Studio Web Service Plan (classic)	Updated
AI	Machine Learning Studio Workspace (classic)	Updated
AI	Machine Learning	Updated
Application	API Playground	New
Application	Chaos Experiment Target	New
Application	Chaos Experiment	New
Application	Chaos Studio	New
Application	CloudTest Account	New
Application	CloudTest Image	New
Application	Container App	New
Application	DICOM service	New
Application	FHIR Service	New
Application	Genomics Account	Updated
Compute	Azure Compute Gallery	New
Compute	Azure Edge Hardware Center	New
Compute	Capacity Reservation Group	New
Compute	VM Application Definition	New
Compute	VM Application Version	New
Compute	VM Image Definition	New
Compute	VM Image Version	New
Data	Time Series Insights Reference Data Set	Updated
Data	Video Analyzer for Media	New
Deployment	Azure DevOps	Updated
Deployment	Custom Template	New
IoT	IoT connector	New
Management	Azure Arc Private Link Scope	New
Management	Invoice	New
Networking	Network Function Manager – Device	New
Networking	Network Function Manager – Network Function	New
Networking	Network Function Manager – Vendor	New
Networking	Network Manager	New
Security	Confidential Ledger	New

Previous

Version 3.8 - 09/10/2021

Updated double click behavior on each icon to open the text box editor as requested by @jikuja. Added new icons below.

Category	Icon	Status
AI	Cognitive Services Communication Services	New
Application	Fluid Relay	New
Compute	Azure Edge Hardware Center	New
Compute	Capacity Reservation Group	New
Compute	Windows 365	New
Data	Azure Integration Runtime	New
Data	Data Lake Storage Gen2	New
Data	Integration Runtime	New
Data	Linked Integration Runtime	New
Data	Shared Integration Runtime	New
Data	Snowflake	New
Data	SSIS Integration Runtime	New
Deployment	1ES	New
Deployment	1ES CloudTest Account	New
Deployment	1ES CloudTest Image	New
Deployment	1ES Hosted Pool	New
Deployment	Bicep	New
Deployment	Custom Template	New
Dynamics 365	Application Business Central	New
Dynamics 365	Application Commerce	New
Dynamics 365	Application Connected Store	New
Dynamics 365	Application Core HR	New
Dynamics 365	Application Customer Insights	New
Dynamics 365	Application Customer Service	New
Dynamics 365	Application Customer Service Insights	New
Dynamics 365	Application Customer Voice	New
Dynamics 365	Application Field Service	New
Dynamics 365	Application Finance	New
Dynamics 365	Application Finance and Operations	New
Dynamics 365	Application Fraud Protection	New
Dynamics 365	Application Intelligent Order Management	New
Dynamics 365	Application Market Insights	New
Dynamics 365	Application Marketing	New
Dynamics 365	Application Product Insights	New
Dynamics 365	Application Project Operations	New
Dynamics 365	Application Project Service Automation	New
Dynamics 365	Application Project Timesheet	New
Dynamics 365	Application Return To School	New
Dynamics 365	Application Return To Work	New
Dynamics 365	Application Sales	New
Dynamics 365	Application Sales Insights	New
Dynamics 365	Application SCM Warehousing	New
Dynamics 365	Application Supply Chain Management	New
Dynamics 365	Application Sustainability Calculator	New
Dynamics 365	Application Talent	New
Dynamics 365	Application Talent Attract	New
Dynamics 365	Application Talent Onboard	New
Dynamics 365	Dynamics 365	New
Dynamics 365	Mixed Reality Guide	New
Dynamics 365	Mixed Reality Import Tool	New
Dynamics 365	Mixed Reality Layout	New
Dynamics 365	Mixed Reality Portal	New
Dynamics 365	Mixed Reality Product Visualise	New
Dynamics 365	Mixed Reality Remote Assist	New
Dynamics 365	Mixed Reality Voice Assistant	New
Identity	Azure AD B2B	Updated
IoT	IoT Connector	New
Management	Intelligent Recommendations Account	New
Management	Metrics Advisor	New
Management	Resource Management Private Link	New
Management	Update Management Center	New
Networking	Service Endpoint	Updated
Office365	O365 - Dataverse	New
Office365	O365 - Power App Virtual Agent	New

Version 3.7 - 23/07/2021

Exciting update with this release. For a while I have been building my own set of Icons to represent workload services for infrastructure hosted anywhere. While not technically Azure specific I have utilised the same colouring and styling as per the Azure Icons to maintain consistency with designs especially with Hybrid hosting models.

I started by using previous generation per workload Visio stencils and using those as a design guide I built new icons in the Azure style. To maintain consistency I built a style guide as below so that the primary and secondary icon elements are always aligned, spaced and sized the same. This will be a huge ongoing addition to the icon family and to start off I included PKI, Exchange and a few other common services that would be depicted in a per-workload style design. These are located under the Workload category and I also included the sub component of the services to use for other icons too under the Workload-Services category. Reach out if you would like to see more of these icons. All designed in Visio of course :D

So if that was not enough for a release I also included a total of 100 new Icons as well as fixing the title of the Drawing resources stencil.

Category	Icon	Status
AI	Cognitive Services Bot Web App	New
AI	Cognitive Services Bot Profile	New
AI	Cognitive Services Bot Test in Web Chat	New
AI	Cognitive Services Bot Channel	New
Application	Application Service Authentication	New
Application	Application Service Networking	New
Application	Application Service Quota	New
Application	Application Service Clone App	New
Application	Application Service Health check	New
Application	Application Service Advisor	New
Application	Application Service Console	New
Application	Application Service Deployment Slot	New
Application	Application Service MySQL In App	New
Application	Application Service Editor	New
Application	Application Service API definition	New
Application	Application Service log	New
Application	Application Service Event	New
Application	Application Service WebJob	New
Application	Application Service Log stream	New
Application	Application Service Process Explorer	New
Deployment	Export Template	New
Management	Application Insights Work Item	New
Management	Application Insights Application Map	New
Management	Application Insights Live Metrics	New
Management	Application Insights Failure	New
Management	Application Insights Performance	New
Management	Application Insights User	New
Management	Application Insights Session	New
Management	Application Insights Event	New
Management	Application Insights Funnel	New
Management	Application Insights User Flow	New
Management	Application Insights Retention	New
Management	Application Insights Cohort	New
Management	Application Insights Transaction Search	New
Management	Application Insights Continuous Export	New
Management	Certificate Configuration	New
Management	Certificate Auto Renew Setting	New
Management	Certificate Timeline	New
Networking	Application Gateway WAF Policy Setting	New
Networking	Application Gateway WAF Managed Rule	New
Networking	Application Gateway WAF Custom Rule	New
Networking	Application Gateway Rule	New
Networking	Application Gateway Configuration	New
Networking	Application Gateway Backend Pool	New
Networking	Application Gateway HTTP Setting	New
Networking	Application Gateway Listener	New
Workload	Email Server	New
Workload	Azure Active Directory Sync Primary	New
Workload	Exchange Edge Transport Server	New
Workload	Certification Authority Online Responder	New
Workload	Active Directory Federation Proxy	New
Workload	Azure File Sync Server	New
Workload	File Server	New
Workload	Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services	New
Workload	Active Directory Rights Management Server	New
Workload	Server Cluster	New
Workload	Database Server Generic	New
Workload	Database Server SQL	New
Workload	Web Server	New
Workload	Azure Active Directory Sync Standby	New
Workload	Proxy Server	New
Workload	Exchange Mailbox Server	New
Workload	Exchange Client Access Server	New
Workload	Exchange Hub Transport Server	New
Workload	Generic Email Server	New
Workload	FTP Server	New
Workload	Application Server	New
Workload	Active Directory Federation Services	New
Workload	Active Directory Domain Services	New
Workload	Enterprise Certification Authority Offline Root	New
Workload	Network Device Enrollment Service	New
Workload	Enterprise Certification Authority Subordinate	New
Workload	Enterprise Certification Authority Root	New
Workload	Certification Authority Standalone	New
Workload	Certificatation Authority Enrollment Web Service	New
Workload	Certification Authority Web Enrollment	New
Workload	Certification Authority Policy Web Service	New
Workload	Certification Authority	New
Workload-Service	Database Server SQL	New
Workload-Service	Application Server	New
Workload-Service	Database Server Generic	New
Workload-Service	Active Directory Rights Management Server	New
Workload-Service	Active Directory Federation Services	New
Workload-Service	File Server	New
Workload-Service	FTP Server	New
Workload-Service	Azure File Sync	New
Workload-Service	Exchange Mailbox Server	New
Workload-Service	Devices	New
Workload-Service	Proxy Server	New
Workload-Service	Active Directory Domain Services	New
Workload-Service	Certification Authority Subordinate	New
Workload-Service	Certification Authority Standalone	New
Workload-Service	Web Service	New
Workload-Service	Certification Authority Policy Web Service	New
Workload-Service	Certification Authority	New
Workload-Service	Azure Active Directory Sync Secondary	New
Workload-Service	Azure Active Directory Sync Primary	New
Workload-Service	Exchange Edge Transport Server	New
Workload-Service	Certification Authority Online Responder	New
Workload-Service	Active Directory Federation Proxy	New

Version 3.6 - 28/05/2021

Large update with this release. 56 new or refreshed icons added bringing the collection up to 613 items (Minus drawing tools) I have also completely re-worked the Drawing tools. I Scripted a full extract of the Hex colour values for all icons and sorted them by occurrence, after that I designed a new colour pallet using the top 30 colours that are used across the board. This helps to keep visual consistency with colouring, As well as the colour pallet I did the same for gradients so there are now two pallets to chose from. I also took the most common colours and redrew the connection objects providing a line, arc, glow line, path based and angled connection objects in each colour as well as dashed line boxes as containers.

Fixes

The Azure Icon, so I could not source an SVG of the new Azure Icon so I drew it from scratch but it was not perfect and I found an alignment issue with the bottom two horizontal lines that I corrected. I have since found other “SVG” sources of the Azure Icon but these are not vector images and I refuse to use bitmaps in my stencil.

Text Box positioning, a few updates ago I changed the Y positioning of the Text box to be 14mm below the center of the icon, this lined up the text box nicely with icons of a differing height. Unfortunately this change to position breaks the text box if you resize the icon so I reverted to a calculation based on the height of the icon.

Significant new Icons

Visual Studio and VS Code now have the new Fluent styling, as per the Azure Icon I had to draw these from scratch.

Azure Active Directory Sync hosts, these are based on an upcoming per workload stencil that I am working on that uses the same styling as Azure.

Full list of icon changes below:-

Category	Icon	Status
AI	Cognitive Services Content Moderator	Refreshed
AI	Cognitive Services Data Collection Rule	Refreshed
AI	Cognitive Services Face Detection	Refreshed
AI	Cognitive Services Health Bot	Refreshed
AI	Cognitive Services QnA Maker	Refreshed
AI	Cognitive Services Speech	Refreshed
Identity	AADConnect Staged Rollout	New
Identity	Active Directory Domain Services	Refreshed
Identity	Active Directory Federation Proxy	Refreshed
Identity	Active Directory Federation Services	Refreshed
Identity	Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services	New
Identity	Authentication Context	New
Identity	Azure Active Directory Sync Primary	New
Identity	Azure Active Directory Sync Standby	New
Identity	Continuous Access Evaluation	New
Identity	Custom Control	New
Identity	Identity Governance	New
Identity	Terms of use	New
Identity	User Setting	New
Identity	VPN Connectivity	Refreshed
IoT	Built-in Endpoint	New
IoT	Certificate	New
IoT	Device	New
IoT	File Upload	New
IoT	Identity	New
IoT	Message Routing	New
IoT	Query Explorer	New
Management	Azure Monitor AKS Health	New
Management	Azure Monitor Azure Stack Health	New
Management	Azure Monitor Data Collection Rules	New
Management	Azure Monitor Data sources	New
Management	Azure Monitor Log Analytics Health	New
Management	Azure Monitor Service Bus Health	New

Version 3.5 - 11/05/2021

Azure received an Icon rebranding! The new icon for Azure is here and until the community starts to use it in design and documentation I have included the old one and new one labelled Azure V1 and Azure V2. I also corrected a background issue with the PNG versions. Visio does not allow you to export a PNG file with no background so I had to get a little creative. This would not have been an issue for white background diagrams but in dark mode you would have had a white background box around the icon.

Version 3.4 - 27/04/2021

Icon refresh and new additions

Application - Static Web Folder, FTP, Event Grid Partner Topic and Event Grid Input Output

Compute - Server Farm

Deployment - Commit, Repository, Backlog and Confluent Organization

Generic - Warning

Identity - Azure Token, Azure Active Directory Verifiable Credential, Azure Active Directory Verifiable Credentials, Admin Consent, Azure Active Directory Privileged Identity Management and Collection

Iot - Custom Location

Management - Azure LightHouse Multi Tenancy, Datadog, Diagnostics

Storage - Data Box Gateway

Version 3.3 - 04/03/2021

It is that time of year again. Yes Microsoft Ignite just happened and as always new services were announced. The 2 major new items announced were "Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra" and the new Augmented Reality service "Azure Percept" as well as these 2 I updated or added 28 new icons. I also added 2 new containers to the drawing tools that I use for full architecture diagrams. I am looking into adding smart containers for core features such as Subscription, Resource Group and Virtual Network for the next release.

Version 3.2 - 13/02/2021

The first update for the year. Several new and refreshed icons and a new naming convention for the stencils. 10 days ago I reached 25,000 downloads and I thank everyone for supporting my project.

Version 3.1 - 05/12/2020

Likely to be the last version release for this very interesting year of 2020.

Search Fixes (See above) and added 5 new service icons (The icon for Azure Purview is my new favorite!)

Over the past year I have seen incremental changes to certain icons but not others. The team is doing an amazing job at converting to super modern gradiant shaded versions which look stunning. But some icons have not received a modern revamp.

This was a good opportunity to work through the set and start applying the same style and theme to some of the icons to make them consistent. Here is one example where I have taken the image on the right (User License Allocation) and updated it to match the modern style of other user type icons. This update has 23 new or refreshed icons bringing the total count up to 506 (Excluding drawing tools)

A few more examples (left original, right modern)

Version 3.0 - 14/10/2020

Major update with this release so we are now on version 3! I have added placeholder shape data in preparation for an Azure documentor script that I am working on, essentially this will open up the capability of enumerating resources in Azure and then drawing those resources in Visio and populating each shape with the relevant meta data for the resource. I have included basic fields at this stage that can be retrieved using get-azresource and then added to the shape via PowerShell

Fields included: -

• ResourceID
• Location
• ResourceName
• ResourceGroupName
• ResourceType
• Tags
• SubscriptionID

Based on community feedback from a series of Twitter polls I posted a few months ago I have changed the default text format from dark blue to black

Also based on feedback you now have the option to use a single large stencil containing all 496 icons or you can use the category stencils for just networking, compute etc. I have placed all of the current versions at the root of the repo including categorized structured PNG and SVG versions

Added or refreshed 66 icons

Version 2.8 - 15/07/2020

Refreshed 19 icons and added new ones, welcome Office 365 to the collection. O365 services have been requested a few times so I am starting to add them into the Stencil. These icons are more difficult to convert as sourcing SVG versions is challenging so I have had to trace some bitmap versions by hand in my SVG editor.

Version 2.6 - 21/04/2020

I noticed that the Cosmos DB Icon had broken from a previous update and while fixing that I ended up reviewing and updating 96 icons! – I extended my icon collection passed the Azure Portal as even some of those icons are out of date.

Version 2.5 - 20/04/2020

New Icons and several icon refreshers, fixed the drawing boxes that were fixed to square shapes and not adjustable. Added a new Line drawing tool with a nice glow “A_GlowLine-1” – I am toying with Dark mode designs and this new line format really makes a design jump off the page in my opinion. Below are 2 examples of the same reference architecture

Version 2.4 - 21/02/2020

Added new drawing resources for number labels/boxes/lines and arrows. I have also included SVG and PNG versions of the icons after multiple requests, this was a challenge due to scaling but my script now builds the stencil, SVG and PNG versions of the icons.

Version 2.3 - 22/01/2020

Added new icons for Synapse and others, refreshed 19 updated icons. Big announcement here:-

SEARCH - I finally figured out how to add search metadata to each icon via PowerShell, for best results ensure that Visio search is set to OR keyword matching (Visio Options\Advanced\Show Shape Search Pane\Search for Any of the Words)

Version 2.2 - 05/11/2019

Welcome to the Icon family Azure Arc and Spring Cloud

Version 2.1 - 04/11/2019

This weekend I found another major icon update. 209 icons to be precise! - I have restructured the Repo as well, created a folder structure for archived versions as I felt the landing page was getting a bit cluttered. The latest version will always be at the root of the Repo with previous versions moving into the Archive folder

Version 2.0 - 22/10/2019

Over the past week I have noticed significant updates to key Azure Service Icons and in preparation for an expected announcement at Ignite this year I have re-designed my entire conversion process, previously I had to manually work on each icon to set the initial placement of the connection points and name them for scripted modification. I finally managed to figure out the PS syntax that the Visio COM.Application is expecting for inserting new connection point rows. My process is now automated taking SVG's from a directory and inserting them into my Master Stencil for processing. Recorded a quick video showing the automation into Visio

https://github.com/David-Summers/Azure-Design/blob/master/Assets/VIDEO_Icon-Builder.mp4

Now that I have a new automated process to build the stencil I re-worked every single icon and incorporated over 60 new icon styles that have been updated in the past week. Since this is a major change, I upped the version to 2.0

One key change here is that I renamed the connection points to North, East, West, South and SouthOfText as per the example below

I use this stencil for a suite of Azure Documentor scripts and using named connection points allows you to specify direction for connections easier

Version 1.6 - 8/10/2019

Corrected mis-coloured icons, thanks to Cédric De Loor for pointing that out

Added new icons

1. Maintenance Configuration
2. Azure Blockchain Service
3. Azure Active Directory Identity Secure Score
4. Cloud Simple Service
5. Cloud Simple Node
6. Cloud Simple Virtual Machine
7. Azure Lighthouse Service Provider
8. Peering
9. Role
10. Virtual Cluster
11. Azure Active Directory Risk Detection
12. Azure Active Directory Risky User
13. Azure Active Directory Identity Protection
14. Private Link

**Version 1.5 - 26/08/2019**

Major change with this release, initially I hand placed the four connection points for each icon and that was not perfect placement. I thought it would be easy to script modify the connection point position (like I did with the Text field in V-1.1) but it turns out that Visio does not name a connection point when you add it so I could not modify it through PowerShell. I added a new script process that allowed me to hand place the connection points and then name them 1-5 (I added a new connection point under the text field for easier south connections when there is data in the text field). Now that they are named, I can modify them when I build my stencil using my gold master. Example below: -

"$shape.CellsU("Connections.1.X").Formula = "Width*0.5"" "$shape.CellsU("Connections.1.Y").Formula = "Height*1.1"" "$shape.CellsU("Connections.2.X").Formula = "Width*-0.1"" "$shape.CellsU("Connections.2.Y").Formula = "Height*0.5"" "$shape.CellsU("Connections.3.X").Formula = "Width*1.1"" "$shape.CellsU("Connections.3.Y").Formula = "Height*0.5"" "$shape.CellsU("Connections.4.X").Formula = "Width*0.5"" "$shape.CellsU("Connections.4.Y").Formula = "Height*-0.05"" "$shape.CellsU("Connections.5.X").Formula = "Width*0.5"" "$shape.CellsU("Connections.5.Y").Formula = "Height*-0.6""

Added new icons

• Dedicated Host
• Dedicated Host Group
• Azure Artifact
• Azure Board

**Version 1.4 - 16/08/2019**

Started on the drawing resources, added a colour pallet for what I believe are the best mainly used colours in the stencil range. For fun I scripted an export of every Hex colour value that is being used and there are 88 total colours. Some are extremely close to each other so I selected the most common used colours and included them in the pallet. Added 3 connector styles and deciding on the remaining set. Ideas welcome! and lastly, re-worked the colour scheme on the Azure lighthouse icons.

Added new icons

• SAP Hana
• Virtual Machine Image Classic
• Virtual Machine Image Version
• Virtual Machine Image Definition
• Virtual Machine Classic
• Quickstart Center
• Free Services
• Help and Support
• Recent

**Version 1.3 - 14/08/2019**

Added new Icons for storage account sub services, had to hand draw these as they did not appear to exist. Renamed Data brick to the correct name Databricks.

• Azure Storage Blob
• Azure Storage Queue
• Azure Storage Table

**Version 1.2 - 03/08/2019**

Removed "Azure" prefix for some incorrectly named icons. Added new Icons

• Azure LightHouse Projection
• Azure LightHouse Management
• Azure LightHouse Protection
• Azure LightHouse RBAC
• Azure Batch
• Azure Batch Accounts

**Version 1.1 - 27/07/2019**

First major change, I realized that some of the text fields were not perfectly aligned so I rebuilt my PowerShell process to use dynamic values for the text field. Since the shapes differ in Height\Width my initial placement was slightly off due to distance from center. This placement is now relative to the bottom edge of the icon. I also inserted the name of the icon into the Text field for page drop as well and reformatted the text to a dark Blue. Final change was to add a subtle drop shadow to each icon as I feel they jump off the page with a small amount of depth.

Version 1.0 - 25/07/2019

Initial release of the stencil and bonus SVG and PNG versions. I built a conversion process that can re-colour each icon and these initial versions were made with a Blue and Grey scale pallet.