Through the Interface

Civil 3D 2007 Service Pack 1A Released

A number of additional fixes have been included in this Service Pack, with one being of particular interest to our development partners. If you use the Civil 3D API via COM Interop from Visual Studio 2005 (and possibly earlier versions of Visual Studio .NET), you will no longer be able to build your application once Civil 3D 2007 SP1 has been installed on your system: the installer for the first Service Pack inadvertently overwrites a few Registry keys that point to the Type Libraries for Civil 3D's COM API. This has been addressed in Service Pack 1A, which can... Read more →

.NET and AutoCAD

The AutoCAD Engineering first prototyped a "managed" (for "managed" read ".NET") API for AutoCAD 2004. It was pretty revolutionary stuff at the time - a mixed-mode DLL was created to expose the managed interface and marshall these calls through to "unmanaged" ObjectARX calls. There were a number of reasons .NET was - and remains - very interesting for developers... .NET provides the ease of development previously available only (or at least primarily) to Visual Basic clients through COM. You can make use of COM or .NET components in your project, but generate simple client code using more evolved programming... Read more →

Compatibility of AutoCAD applications between releases

This is a huge topic, so I'm not going to be able to do it justice in this one post. Applications developed using AutoCAD's APIs need to be tested (and sometimes ported) to make sure they work with a new release of the AutoCAD platform. For several generations of AutoCAD we have consciously chosen to break binary application compatibility once every 3 releases (historically - but in recent memory - this happened for AutoCAD 2000, 2004 and now 2007). To make applications work on interim releases they might need minor porting work to migrate their use of Registry settings... Read more →

Webcast in the making

I thought I’d mention one of the projects we’re working on in DevTech right now. We’re planning a webcast for later this year, to talk our developers through the various technologies Autodesk provides to create/access/view native DWG data and published DWF data. Here’s the idea: we show the generation of native DWG data using AutoCAD 2007 (in this case creating a number of 3D solids). We then take show how various technologies can be used to make use of the information stored in the native DWG file. Afterwards, we’ll publish the data to DWF – showing the capacity to... Read more →

Getting started with Autodesk's APIs

Autodesk has a wide range of products that expose Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), to the point that it can be a bit overwhelming for developers new to our products. A great place to look for introductory information around developing with Autodesk software is the Developer Center on Autodesk.com: http://www.autodesk.com/developer From here you will be able to navigate to individual Developer Centers for a number of our products, some of which I’ve provided direct links to below: http://www.autodesk.com/developautocad (AutoCAD) http://www.autodesk.com/developadt (Architectural Desktop) http://www.autodesk.com/developrevit (Revit) http://www.autodesk.com/developmap (Map 3D) http://www.autodesk.com/developmapguide (MapGuide) http://www.autodesk.com/developinventor (Inventor) http://www.autodesk.com/developvault (Vault) http://www.autodesk.com/developdwf (DWF Toolkit) http://www.autodesk.com/developbuzzsaw (Buzzsaw) Each of... Read more →

Introduction to DevTech

I'm very pleased to be part of a great team at Autodesk: the Developer Technical Services team (DevTech), whose focus is on providing high quality services to members of the Autodesk Developer Network. Aside from providing technical support for programming-related questions, we also write technical solutions (which we call DevNotes), present at technical conferences, provide API training and mentoring (a specific type of short-term consulting), and liaise regularly with our Engineering teams. The team is spread around the world: Mikako Harada manages our East Asia team, split between China and Japan, Murali Pappoppula manages the South Asia Pacific (SAPAC)... Read more →

Welcome

Welcome to “Through the Interface”, a blog dedicated to programmers working with Autodesk technologies. My team, Autodesk’s Developer Technical Services (DevTech), provides technical services to members of the Autodesk Developer Network (ADN), including programming support, consulting, training and evangelism. I’ll be using this blog to share technical information about the use of our various Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and component technologies. Members of DevTech are experts on a wide range of Autodesk’s products and APIs, so many of these posts will be contributed by members of my team. A little about myself… I have worked with a number of... Read more →