Is there a way to deploy VBA in a stencil without needing a digital signature

[iankoe]

I have a bunch of Visio Shapes that I use for UML based architecture drawing (http://pro.iankoenig.com/visio.php).  Version 1 only uses shapesheet functions.  There are a number of things I woudl like to do in v2 when the shapes snap together to make them more functional, but since I know of no shapesheet function to parse the formula in a cell (you can only get the evaluated value as far as I can tell), I have to resort to VBA.

Writing the VBA is pretty trivial.  A few lines to pull the formulae out of the PinX/Y cells, parse for the referenced shape and voila you have the relationship.  But unfortunately once I resort to VBA, I am in a whole new world of Visio solutions, requiring a digital certificate and signed object to allow the stencil to be loaded on a target machine.

Basically, I give this stuff away for free, the shapes just assist my architecture diagrams, and I dont have a digital certificate.  All I really want is a small sandbox to play in with some VBA that only touches shapes and pages, but Visio / Microsoft did not write it that way, so here we are.

Is there a way out?  Has anybody tried .Net/VSTO?  Does that satisfy?  Can these things build a managed code addin and not require a digital signature? 

Alternatively, does anybody know of a way to get the formula from a cell?  If I knew that, I could probably do everything in the shapeshheet and avoid VBA altogether.

[Paul Herber]

In case you do go down the digital certificate route then have a look at Mitchell Vincent's site
http://www.ksoftware.net/code_signing.html
A very reasonable $99/year.