Drawing Resources
Azure_Drawing-Resources_V-5.0.vssx ships alongside the icon set as a companion stencil with 93 hand-authored shapes for annotating diagrams: dashed boxes, lines of every flavour, callouts, bubbles, glow effects, and connector arrows.
Contents
Containers and outlines
| Category | Variants | Use |
|---|---|---|
| A_DashBox | 10 styles | Dashed bounding box around a logical group of icons |
| F_Bubble | 10 styles | Speech-bubble / annotation pop-out |
Connectors
| Category | Variants | Use |
|---|---|---|
| B_Line | 10 styles | Plain straight lines (no arrowheads) |
| C_PathLine | 10 styles | Right-angle path lines, double-headed arrows |
| D_AngleLine | 10 styles | Single-bend angled lines |
| E_ArcLine | 10 styles | Curved arc lines |
| I_Arrow | 3 styles | Single-end arrows: Single, Dashed, Thick |
Callouts
| Category | Variants | Use |
|---|---|---|
| E_Callout | 10 styles | Boxed annotations with leader lines |
Glow effects
| Category | Variants | Use |
|---|---|---|
| G_GlowLine | 9 colours | Coloured glow halos along a line: Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Teal, Pink, Purple, Orange, White |
| H_GlowBox | 9 colours | Coloured glow halo around a box: same nine colours |
The three colours in bold are new in V-5.0.
Palettes
| Category | Variants | Use |
|---|---|---|
| Z_Colours-01 | Single reference master | Visio colour palette swatch for picking consistent fills |
| Z_Gradients-01 | Single reference master | Visio gradient palette swatch |
Using the connector arrows
The new I_Arrow masters are 1-D connector shapes – you drop one onto the canvas, grab its endpoints, and drag them onto the connection points of two icons. The line bridges the icons; the filled-triangle arrowhead sits at the End anchor.
If you find yourself wanting a curved arrow, glue a C_PathLine between two icons – the legacy “PathLine” masters are all double-headed arrows.
Glow shapes for emphasis
Drop a H_GlowBox-Red-01 behind a group of icons to highlight them in a red halo. The glow size is configurable via the shape’s right-click → Edit shape data if you want it tighter or looser. Pair with a matching G_GlowLine of the same colour for a connector that visually “ties” two highlighted areas.
Origin
The drawing-resources stencil is a hand-authored collection of annotation shapes refined over years of Azure diagramming, vendored into V-5.0 with new colour and arrow variants. The base file is preserved in the build pipeline’s resources/Stencil-Drawing-Resources-source.vssx and the extended copy is regenerated via scripts/extend_drawing_stencil.py.
If you have a request for a new variant (different glow colour, specific connector style, a custom callout), open a Discussion.