Through the Interface

And it was all going so well...

It looked like the perfect trip across to AU: the train connection was good, so even though I had a 9am flight from Geneva to Newark I could leave my house at 6am and still make it (even after dinner at friends' the night before, but that's another story). The flight itself went well: I'd managed to snag a bulkhead seat - the first row in economy - and had an empty seat next to me. I even slept for a few hours, which is really rare for me on a flight. I got off the plane really quickly,... Read more →

Reclaiming memory from erased AutoCAD entities using .NET

I was pleasantly surprised the other day to find that the "permanent object deletion" API I mentioned back in this post - and had marked as only being available in ObjectARX - was also exposed in the .NET API to AutoCAD 2009. What better way to celebrate the good news than to put together some test code and post it to my blog? :-) So, for a Thanksgiving/pre-AU treat, here's some information on making use of the Database.ReclaimMemoryFromErasedObjects() method to - surprisingly enough - reclaim memory from erased objects. Firstly, why is this even needed? Well, when you erase... Read more →

Counting down to AU [Unplugged] 2008...

There's just one week to go before this year's Autodesk University. If you need more accuracy than this Shaan's here to help. :-) I'm going to be pretty busy with last-minute (well, last-week) preparation for the event, but will try to post the odd item of interest. For those of you who won't be in Vegas for AU 2008, please do keep checking this blog: I expect to keep posting during the course of the week which will hopefully prove to be of interest whether you were able to attend or not. One month ago I mentioned an AU... Read more →

Adding a custom tab to AutoCAD's options dialog using .NET - Part 2

This post extends the approach shown in this previous post to implement a realistic editing and storage mechanism for application settings. It uses the .NET PropertyGrid control to display a custom class, allowing editing of a number of properties. This class is also serializable, which means we can use the .NET Framework to save it out to an XML file on disk. Some readers may have their own approaches to saving custom application settings, whether in the Registry or elsewhere: this post is primarily about displaying properties rather than providing a definitive "how to" for storing custom application settings.... Read more →

Adding a custom tab to AutoCAD's options dialog using .NET - Part 1

A big thanks to Viru Aithal, from our DevTech India team, for providing the code that inspired this post. Update: it turns out I didn't look deeply enough into the origins of the code behind this post. The code that inspired Viru's code that inspired mine came from our old friend Mike Tuersley, who's delivering a class on customizing the Options dialog at this year's AU (in just over a week). Thanks, Mike! :-) One way that applications often want to integrate with AutoCAD is via the dialog displayed by the OPTIONS command. Luckily it's relatively easy to add... Read more →

Adding custom properties to AutoCAD's rollover tooltip and its quick properties panel

This topic is a little on the advanced side - it requires the use of C++ and some knowledge of COM - but I felt it was worth covering, as you can get some interesting results without a huge amount of effort. Since we introduced the Properties Palette (once known as the Object Property Manager (OPM) and otherwise referred to as the Properties Window) back in AutoCAD 2004 (I think it was) it has become a core tool for viewing and editing properties of AutoCAD objects. In AutoCAD 2009 we have taken the concept further, allowing properties to be... Read more →

Implementing task dialogs inside AutoCAD using .NET - Part 2

In this previous post we looked at a basic task dialog inside AutoCAD and exercised its various capabilities without showing how they might be used in a real application. This post goes beyond that to show how you might make use of the TaskDialog class to provide your users with relevant information at runtime that helps them decide how best to proceed in certain situations, effectively increasing your application's usability. The specific scenario is this: if the user selects a lot of entities - too many for our command to handle quickly - we want to show a dialog... Read more →

Getting Visual Studio a little more cheaply

I don't normally talk about product offers, but then it occurred to me that some readers would find this promotion of interest. Microsoft is making Visual Studio 2008 available to first-time purchasers at the upgrade price, as long as they are using another development tool, including free tools such as Visual Studio Express Editions. It should go without saying that users of previous versions of Visual Studio are also eligible for this price (as long as they are not Visual Studio volume licensees). This means that - as long as you have downloaded and installed an Express version of... Read more →

A couple of interesting posts

A couple of posts on other blogs that may be of interest to this blog's readership: CAB Files Present vs. CAB Files Future: over on Beyond the Paper, Volker Joseph raises the possibility of Autodesk Design Review moving from a simple CAB distribution model to one which would allow installation of pre-requisite modules (presumably such as the .NET Framework), which would result in a larger distribution. If you have an opinion - one way or another - on this topic, please post a comment on Volker's blog. Autodesk Developer Network (ADN): Support and Expertise from Concept to Market: over... Read more →

Implementing task dialogs inside AutoCAD using .NET - Part 1

This is a topic I've been meaning to get to for some time... as I finally had to research it for a side project I'm working on, I decided to go ahead and post my findings here. AutoCAD 2009 makes heavy use of task dialogs, which are basically message-boxes on steroids. MSDN contains documentation on Microsoft's implementation of task dialogs, although our implementation is a little different. Why bother with these new task dialogs? They provide a way of asking more user-friendly questions using actual actions as answers rather than yes/no/cancel etc. It's a bit like the way I... Read more →

Pitching .NET to a hardcore C++ developer

This comment came in from a developer on a previous post: We still do all our stuff w/C++/STL/COM/MFC; lots of custom entities and object behavior - for Civil 3D/Land Desktop/Map -- hence, I'm not Dot Netted. The predominate explanation I've heard to move from C++ to .Net is that UI is maybe easier to write...but we've had all that nicely standardized for years (although I could still strangle someone at MS at least once a week/month.) We tend to minimize external API use, whether ObjectArx/Win32/MFC, and try to have portable code. Granted, it's mostly Win32 dependent and perhaps lacks... Read more →

Displaying a context menu during a custom AutoCAD command using .NET

Some of you may have stumbled across these previous posts, which show how to add custom context menu items for specific object types and to the default AutoCAD context menu. There is a third way to create and display context menus inside AutoCAD, and this approach may prove useful to those of you who wish to display context menus during particular custom commands. One word of caution: I've been told that this technique does not currently work for transparent commands, so if your command needs to be called transparently then this may not be the approach for you (you... Read more →

Creating a custom AutoCAD table style using .NET

The question of how to define a new table style programmatically has come up a couple of times over the last week or so, so this post shows how to approach this. I've used the code from this previous post as a basis for this post's. The important thing to know is that TableStyle objects are stored in a special dictionary, which can be accessed via a Database's TableStyleDictionaryId property. This ObjectId property allows you to access the dictionary, from which you can query the contents, determine whether your style exists and add a new one if it doesn't.... Read more →