Through the Interface

Adding aliases for custom AutoCAD commands

I had an interesting question come in by email and thought I'd share it via this post. To summarise the request, the developer needed to allow command aliasing for their custom commands inside AutoCAD. The good news is that there's a standard mechanism that works for both built-in and custom commands: acad.pgp. acad.pgp is now found in this location on my system: C:\Documents and Settings\walmslk\Application Data\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2008\R17.1\enu\Support\acad.pgp We can edit this text file to add our own command aliases at the end: NL, *NETLOAD MCC, *MYCUSTOMCOMMAND Here we've simply created an alias for the standard NETLOAD command (a simple... Read more →

Using F# to simulate hardware behaviour

This post has nothing whatsoever to do with Autodesk software: I just thought some of you might be interested in an old project I worked on during my University studies. I've already mentioned the project briefly in a couple of previous posts. So, after dusting off the 3.5 floppies I found in the attic, and working out how to extract the code from the gzipped tarballs they contained (thankfully WinZIP took care of that), I started the work to port the code from Miranda to F#. Miranda is still available for many OS platforms, although it has apparently largely... Read more →

Using F# Asynchronous Workflows to simplify concurrent programming in AutoCAD

In the last post we saw some code that downloaded data - serially - from a number of websites via RSS and created AutoCAD entities linking to the various posts. As promised, in today's post we take that code and enable it to query the same data in parallel by using Asynchronous Workflows in F#. Asynchronous Workflows are an easy-to-use yet powerful mechanism for enabling concurrent programming in F#. Firstly, a little background as to why this type of technique is important. As many - if not all - of you are aware, the days of raw processor speed... Read more →

Turning AutoCAD into an RSS reader with F#

OK, OK, you are probably thinking "why would anyone ever want to use AutoCAD as an RSS reader?". The answer is, of course, "they wouldn't". The point of the next few posts is not actually to enable AutoCAD to be used to read RSS, but to show how it is possible to use F# and .NET to extract information from RSS feeds and create corresponding AutoCAD entities. The reason I came onto this subject will also become more clear when you see my next post: I have been researching Asynchronous Workflows in F# - an uber-cool mechanism for managing... Read more →

Source now available for the .NET Framework 3.5

A quick post, for now, just to point you to this blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/sburke/archive/2008/01/16/configuring-visual-studio-to-debug-net-framework-source-code.aspx This will only work with Visual Studio 2008, it seems, so I haven't yet tested this out myself (I tend to be a laggard when it comes to Visual Studio, for some reason). A quick note on what I've been up to in my spare time: I'm currently diving deeply into F#, to prepare for some internal presentations I'll be giving in February. As part of the exercise I went up to the attic and dusted off the 3.5" floppies containing my old final year project... Read more →

Understanding the properties of textual linetype segments in AutoCAD

In the last post we looked at using .NET to define complex linetypes containing text segments. In the post I admitted to not knowing specifics about the properties used to create the text segment in the linetype, and, in the meantime, an old friend took pity on me and came to the rescue. :-) Mike Kehoe, who I've known for many years since we worked together in the Guildford office of Autodesk UK, sent me some information that I've reproduced below. Mike now works for Micro Concepts Ltd., an Autodesk reseller, developer and training centre. He originally wrote the... Read more →

Creating a complex AutoCAD linetype containing text using .NET

In my last post we saw some code to create a simple linetype using .NET. As a comment on that post, Mark said: Kean, i tried you code and it works great and it also got me thinking... is it possible to programmitically add text in as well? I've tried using ltr.SetTextAt(1, "TEST") but so far i've had no luck, any suggestions??? It turned out to be quite a bit more complicated to make a linetype containing text than merely calling SetTextAt() on one of the segments. In order to understand what properties needed setting, I first loaded the... Read more →

Creating an AutoCAD linetype programmatically using .NET

Happy New Year, everyone! I had a very relaxing break over the holiday period: during the better part of two weeks I managed to stay away from my PC and even my BlackBerry, which I admit I'm generally not very good at ignoring. So now I'm easing back into the swing of things, remembering how to type and open modelspaces, among other things. :-) To save my brain from unnecessary stress during the first few weeks of 2008, I've decided to take inspiration from the ADN website. Today's post is based on this DevNote, which shows how to create... Read more →