Through the Interface

Breathing fresh life into LISP applications with a modern GUI

This recent entry on Jimmy Bergmark's JTB World Blog brought to my attention the fact that ObjectDCL is about to become an Open Source project. Chad Wanless, the father of ObjectDCL, was a very active ADN member for many years, but - according to this post on the ObjectARX discussion group - is now unable to spend time working on ObjectDCL due to a severe medical condition. In case Chad is reading this... Chad - all of us here at ADN wish you a speedy recovery and all the best for your future endeavours. Ignoring the background behind the... Read more →

Advanced Visual Studio debugging: how to stop stepping into certain functions

While debugging it's sometimes very frustrating to find yourself repeatedly stepping into an irrelevant function. For instance, complex statements pretty commonly include object constructors etc. that you know function perfectly well, but the debugger routinely takes you into them. The Visual Studio IDE has an undocumented (and unsupported) mechanism to help with this. During the VC 6.0 timeframe it was implemented via our old friend the autoexp.dat file (see my previous post on this), in a special section called [ExecutionControl]. Since VC 7.0 this has been moved to the Registry. For VC 7.0 and 7.1, it was in the... Read more →

Autodesk Building Systems .NET API Webcast

A quick note: there's a free webcast tomorrow, July 27th, on Autodesk's Building System's .NET API. It's being delivered by Steve Milligan, a member of the ABS Engineering team. For more information go here, or here to register. Read more →

Advanced Visual Studio debugging: automatic expansion of watched variables

I've been using Visual C++ (and afterwards Visual Studio) since it was 16-bit, back in version 1.52. OK, maybe that's not so long ago, relatively (11 short years), but the point is that in spite of having followed the Visual Studio technology over this period, I've so far been completely unaware of the autoexp.dat file. This feature of the Visual Studio was brought to my attention by Ahsan Ali, a programmer in the Inventor Engineering team who was based over in Bangalore at the same time I was (we had both previously worked in the US - he had... Read more →

Calling the DWFRender Web Service from HTML

I decided to go ahead and put a test page together for the DWFRender Web Service. It still wasn't feasible to make it part of the blog itself, given the issues with scripting, particularly, but I've included the files here for you to download and run locally: Download freewheel_web_service_test.zip There are three web methods called by this code: pdkVersion - gets the version of the PDK on the server (a string value) pageCount - gets the number of pages for a particular DWF file (an integer value) load - gets more detailed information about each page in a DWF... Read more →

Project Freewheel: Losing Control!

Project Freewheel is a project that was recently launched via Autodesk Labs. It's a technology preview that allows you to share DWF files without the need for installing a client application that includes an ActiveX control for DWF display (such as the DWF Viewer or Design Review). There are three main features of Project Freewheel that are of interest to developers. Let's take a look at them below. Embedding a navigable DWF It's now really simple to embed a DWF file in your web page without forcing a download of the DWF Viewer application. As long as your DWF... Read more →

Linking 2D and 3D with the DWF Viewer 7 API

I haven't written about the API capabilities of the DWF Viewer, as yet, but this is a technology I really enjoy working with. The latest release (version 7), especially, has some really cool API capabilities: while you've been able to respond to selection events in 2D views for some time, it's now also possible to manipulate 3D views, selecting which objects should be displayed. If you throw in the capabilities of AutoCAD's DWF Metadata API (which allows you to add in custom metadata into both 2D and 3D DWF sheets, as they're being published) you really get some interesting... Read more →

Migrating ObjectARX applications to support Unicode - some resources

The work we did to migrate AutoCAD 2007 to use Unicode (rather than MBCS), has impacted many developers around the world. For those that are yet to go through the pain themselves, I thought I'd talk about the resources that are available to ObjectARX developers needing to port their applications to Unicode. Firstly, you should check out the Migration Guide that ships with the ObjectARX 2007 SDK (docs/acad_xmg.chm): There's a whole section called "Upgrading to Unicode", with lots of useful information. A good deal of the material in the guide was compiled during the development phase of AutoCAD 2007,... Read more →

Free API webcasts

The DevTech team spends a substantial amount of time delivering API training, and not just to ADN members. We schedule class-room trainings at various Autodesk facilities, deliver training on-site at developers' offices, and deliver training webcasts via Microsoft LiveMeeting. Mikako Harada, the team lead for DevTech East Asia and the technical lead for our BSD workgroup, will deliver a webcast on Architectural Desktop's .NET API on July 13th. This webcast is absolutely free to everyone. For more information on our API training - and to register for the webcast - please check Autodesk's API training page at http://www.autodesk.com/apitraining. For... Read more →

Calling ObjectARX functions from a .NET application

One of the really compelling features of .NET is its ability to call "legacy" unmanaged C++ APIs. I say "legacy", but we use this facility regularly to call APIs that are far from being considered defunct (the C++ version of ObjectARX is alive and kicking, believe me! :-). Autodesk understands that our development partners have invested many years in application development, and can't afford to throw that investment away to support the latest & greatest (and sometimes "flavor of the month") programming technology. For example, over the years we've made sure it was possible to create a VB or... Read more →

Debugging using Express Editions

Most of our desktop products support a "plug-in" model of development: you create a DLL (which may or may not be renamed with a number of extensions, such as DBX or ARX) which gets loaded into the calling executable's memory space. This allows the process to share memory with the loaded modules, improving performance over the more archaic IPC (inter-process communication)-based architectures. [Here begins retracted information...] While Visual C++ Express Edition supports debugging DLL projects using an external executable, Visual C# Express and Visual VB.NET Express Editions do not. When developing with our products it is extremely common to... Read more →

Getting the ObjectARX Wizard to work with Visual Studio Express editions

This topic was suggested by one of our ADN members - Paul Richardson, from CAD System Engineering - and answered by Cyrille Fauvel, from DevTech EMEA. So all I really had to do was copy/paste and some minor editing... now that's my kind of blogging. :-) The ObjectARX Wizard's installer targets the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 platform rather than the Microsoft Visual C++/C#/VB.NET Express Editions. The main reasons for this are the limitations of the Express Editions' IDE - particularly due to its lack of support for AddIns. The ObjectARX Wizard is actually made up of a number of... Read more →

Getting started with AutoCAD and .NET

To get started with writing a .NET app for AutoCAD, download the ObjectARX SDK for AutoCAD 2007. Contained within the samples/dotNet folder of the SDK are a number of helpful samples showing how to use various features of the managed API to AutoCAD. Incidentally, the project files etc. are generally saved in the version of Visual Studio that is recommended to build ObjectARX (C++) apps for that version of AutoCAD. So the projects in the ObjectARX 2006 SDK will be for Visual Studio .NET 2002, and in ObjectARX 2007 they will be for Visual Studio 2005. These specific Visual... Read more →