Through the Interface

Leaving Las Vegas

I'm sat here at McCarran airport, tapping in a quick post before flying off to Boston. I didn't get the chance to post on the happenings this week at AU (or about anything much else, for that matter), but many others have, so I expect that's OK. I have to say I really enjoyed this year’s AU, even if I’m now feeling a little frazzled. It was a real pleasure to put so many faces to names over the course of the week, as well as to catch up with old acquaintances. I'd also like to say a quick... Read more →

Metaprogramming with AutoCAD - Part 3

In parts 1 & 2 of this series we looked at metaprogramming with AutoCAD using AutoLISP and VB(A), and then using VB.NET and C#. In this post we're going to look at what's possible from F#, through the lens of my relative inexperience with the language, of course. The quotations mechanism in F# appears to be the way to represent, analyse and execute program structure. This article describes the concepts, although it's quite deep and doesn't address the case that's most immediately interesting to AutoCAD develeopers: the ability to evaluate and execute code represented as a string. In fact,... Read more →

Metaprogramming with AutoCAD - Part 2

In this post we're going to continue the topic started in Part 1 of this series, which looked briefly at metaprogramming with AutoCAD using AutoLISP and VB(A). Now we're going to look at .NET, focusing initially on C# and VB.NET. [I found the inspiration for the code in this post from The Code Project, although I had to update the code to use non-deprecated CLR methods as well as making it work for AutoCAD, of course.] While .NET doesn't provide something as simple as an Eval() function, it actually provides something much more interesting. The CLR exposes the ability... Read more →

Visual Studio 2008 & .NET Framework 3.5 released

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5. For the announcement see Soma's blog and for more detailed information see Scott Guthrie's. I haven't yet worked with this version of Visual Studio, but I'm told it installs side-by-side with previous versions of Visual Studio, so I'll be taking a look after AU. Some of the areas I'm especially interested in - and this is not an exhaustive list of all the cool stuff the release includes... :-) C#/VB language features, many of which have come from the world of functional programming Automatic properties, extension methods, lambda... Read more →

Metaprogramming with AutoCAD - Part 1

A recent comment on one of my F# articles got me thinking about this topic (thanks, Thomas! :-), so I thought I’d write a few posts on it. Next week is AU, and the week after that I’m attending a training class in Boston, so posts may be a little sparse over the coming weeks. Metaprogramming – according to the definition on Wikipedia – is the act of writing code that writes or manipulates other programs (or itself). But what is it really all about? The vast majority of programmers are actually metaprogramming without realizing it has such a... Read more →

Getting the total volume of 3D solids in an AutoCAD model using F#

In one of my sessions at this year's AU, "There's More to .DWG Than AutoCAD®", I'll be showing some VB.NET code that goes through and collects information about solids, presenting it in a dialog along with the sum of the various volumes. You can get the code and the results from Part 1 of the session's handout. Just for fun, I thought I'd write some F# code to add the volumes of the 3D solid objects in the modelspace of the current drawing. I adopt a similar approach to the VB code - not caring about intersecting volumes, for... Read more →

More fun with F# and AutoCAD: string extraction and manipulation

I've been working through some draft chapters of Don Syme's Expert F# book (posted here, while the final version will be available in hardcover from early December). I'm definitely enjoying working with F#: the beauty of functional programming combined with the flexibility of .NET is a killer combination. Before I dive into the sample I put together for today's post, I thought I'd scribble down some musings on the language, to help position the technology in comparison with more popular imperative/object-oriented languages... Functional programming is great for deep mathematical problems, and so will play well with developers needing to... Read more →

Using AJAX to generate pages hosting Freewheel views

I touched on this subject a few weeks ago in part 2 of my DWF-related AU handout, but thought I'd come back and describe in more depth some of the fun (although a more accurate word might be "difficulty" :-) I had solving this problem. I've been playing around with web services and XML since SaaS was still known as ASP, and have tried to stay up-to-date with the technology as best I can. I'm really a client-side programmer, all things considered: I've created some server-side code, but have mostly involved myself with desktop-oriented programming and creation of samples... Read more →

A mathematical F# application integrating with AutoCAD via .NET

For my follow-up F# post I wanted to find something that showed off more of the capabilities of the F# language, while remaining something worth integrating with AutoCAD. The good news (at least as far as I'm concerned :-) is that one of the samples that ships with F# turned out to be perfect for this. The sample is known as "The Famous DirectX Demo", and is really, really cool. It uses F# to represent - extremely succinctly - a simulated, animated surface. And when I say succinct I mean it's tiny: with F# it's possible to represent complex... Read more →

DevTV: Introductory recordings on Autodesk APIs

My team has been working very hard on some recordings of introductory presentations around our APIs. Here is the first batch of recordings we've just posted as part of our DevTV series (the idea being these are recordings that are "produced", while our webcast recordings are somewhat raw): Introduction to AutoCAD .NET Programming view download (148 MB) Introduction to Inventor Programming view download (51.7 MB) Introduction to Revit Programming view download (64.3 MB) Introduction to Civil 3D Programming view download (27.3 MB) Introduction to MapGuide Enterprise Programming view download (37.4 MB) Enjoy! :-) Update For those of you looking... Read more →