Through the Interface

DevDays Online recordings available

The recordings from our recent DevDays Online events, covering API-related information about much of the 2010 family of products, are now available: AutoCAD download (27.3 Mb) AEC download (47.5 Mb) Geospatial download (14.6 Mb) Manufacturing download (27.0 Mb) Civil 3D download (14.2 Mb) Enjoy! :-) Read more →

Customizing the display of standard AutoCAD objects using F#

This post is one of the winning entries of the F# programming contest started at the beginning of the year. It was submitted by an old friend of mine, Qun Lu, who also happens to be a member of the AutoCAD engineering team, and makes use of a new API in AutoCAD 2010: the somewhat ominously-named Overrule API. The Overrule API is really (and I mean really, really) cool. Yes, I know: another really cool API in AutoCAD 2010? Well, I’m honestly not one to hype things up, but I do have a tendency to get excited by technology... Read more →

Free-form modeling in AutoCAD 2010 using .NET

A big thanks to Stephen Preston, who manages DevTech Americas and coordinates our worldwide AutoCAD workgroup as well as spending time working with the AutoCAD Engineering team (phew!), for providing this sample. Stephen originally put it together for our annual Developer Days tour late last year: I took the original sample, converted it from VB.NET to C# and made some minor changes to the code. The VB.NET version is available from the ADN website, in case. The Free-Form Design feature in AutoCAD 2010 is one of the coolest enhancements to the product (I really like the Parametric Drawing feature,... Read more →

Jigging an AutoCAD solid using IronPython and .NET

After getting my feet wet in the last post with my first IronPython application running inside AutoCAD, I decided it was time to attack a slightly more challenging problem: jigging a database-resident Solid3d object. The idea had come after I’d received a question by email from David Wolfe, who wanted to have a fully rendered 3D view of a cylinder he was jigging. I’d done something similar for a prototype application I worked on late last year (which was demoed at AU). The jig itself only collected the selection data I needed – the display of the Solid3d objects... Read more →

Using IronPython with AutoCAD

I’ve been meaning to play around with the Python language for some time, now, and with the recent release of IronPython 2 it seems a good time to start. Why Python? A number of people in my team – including Jeremy Tammik and the people within our Media & Entertainment workgroup who support Python’s use with Maya and MotionBuilder – are fierce proponents of the language. I’m told that it’s an extremely easy, general-purpose, dynamic programming language. All of which sounds interesting, of course, although I have to admit I’m less convinced of the importance of the dynamic piece:... Read more →

Jigging an AutoCAD block with attributes using .NET

Thanks, once again, to Philippe Leefsma, a DevTech engineer based in Prague, for contributing the code for this post. While researching an issue he was working on Philippe stumbled across a comment on this previous post where I more-or-less said jigging attributes wasn’t possible. Ahem. Anyway, Philippe decided to – quite rightly – prove me wrong, and the result is today’s post. :-) It turns out that the trick to jigging a block with attributes is to add the block reference to the database prior to running the jig. I’d been coming at this from another direction – working... Read more →

Exposing AutoCAD's Properties Palette functionality to .NET - Part 2

In the last post we looked at the code behind an ObjectARX module exposing AutoCAD's Properties Palette for use from managed .NET languages. Thanks again to Cyrille Fauvel for providing this implementation. In this post we're going to move right onto using this implementation from C#. First things first: if you didn't understand much of what was said in the previous post in this series, Don't Panic! (Yes, that's a quick reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) The actual implementation details aren't particularly important - you only really need to understand them if you want to expose... Read more →

Exposing AutoCAD's Properties Palette functionality to .NET - Part 1

A huge thanks to Cyrille Fauvel, who manages DevTech's Media & Entertainment team but still finds the time to dip into the odd deeply-technical, AutoCAD-related issue. Cyrille provided the original article on this topic late last year, but it's taken me time to get around to editing and publishing it. A quick tip... if you're not interested in the technical details of how Cyrille has exposed the various Properties Palette interfaces to .NET, you can safely skip this post and join us again when we go ahead and make use of the implementation to add dynamic properties to core... Read more →

Batch conversion between DWF and DWFx

Over on Beyond the Paper, Volker Joseph has posted a DWF Toolkit console application that can be used to batch-convert between the DWF and DWFx formats. Read more →

DevTV sessions for Max & Maya

As mentioned in this previous post, my team also provides technical services around the APIs for our Media & Entertainment products such as 3ds Max, Maya and MotionBuilder. We've now posted introductory DevTV sessions for 3ds Max and Maya: Introduction to Maya Dependency Graph Programming view download (44.3 Mb) Introduction to 3ds Max Programming download (130.5 Mb) The 3ds Max DevTV comprises two separate days, which is why it hasn't been extracted and hosted for online viewing: you'll need to download the ZIP to watch that one. Enjoy! :-) Read more →

Painting properties between dynamic AutoCAD blocks using .NET

In the last post we looked at some code that essentially dumped out the dynamic properties of dynamic blocks to the command-line. In this post we take it a step further and capture the properties from one dynamic block reference and attempt to apply them to another. We're going to apply slightly different logic, depending on the situation... If the block references refer to the same dynamic block definition (i.e. their DynamicBlockTableRecord property contains the same ObjectId) then we'll assume they have the same dynamic properties in the same order. So we'll go through and attempt to copy the... Read more →

Accessing the properties of a dynamic AutoCAD block using .NET

This is one of those funny scenarios... I was just thinking about what to do for my next post - whether to dive into some new features of AutoCAD 2010 (which I will do soon, I promise! :-) or whether to choose something from my ever-increasing to-do list, when I received two emails. One was from our old friend Fernando Malard, suggesting a topic for a blog post, and the other was from Philippe Leefsma, a member of our DevTech team in Europe, in response to an ADN members question. It provided some code that could eventually form the... Read more →

Smoothly transitioning between 3D AutoCAD views using .NET - Part 2

Thanks again to Fenton Webb for providing the code behind the first post in the series and to Jeremy Tammik for providing the suggestion of this alternative implementation. This post follows on from this previous post, which introduced a technique to smoothly transition between 3D views in AutoCAD. It applies a more standard algorithm - known as spherical linear interpolation (or Slerp to its friends :-) - to interpolate between views, rather than interpolating individual values using Fenton's custom-built CosInterp() function. We still use CosInterp() to interpolate the width and height of the field of view, but otherwise the... Read more →