Through the Interface

Visit to SaloneSatellite at Milan Design Week 2009

As those of you following me on Twitter may know, I spent Monday morning at Milan Design Week. I had a couple of reasons for being in Milan at this time. Firstly, my grandmother now lives there, so I spent Sunday evening (the evening of her birthday) with her and my Milan-resident family. The second reason was Milan Design Week. In recent weeks I’ve been in touch with a Swedish designer, Staffan Holm, who I knew would be exhibiting at SaloneSatellite during this year’s Milan Design Week. SaloneSatellite is the general-admission (i.e. it’s free to get in) section of... Read more →

Introducing DevLabs

My team is trying out a new concept over the coming months, something we’re calling DevLabs. The idea is that we schedule a period where members of my team are available in a particular Autodesk office to sit down with people working on their development projects. (The concept is new for us, at least: I know Google does something similar with their Hackathons.) Attendees can plan on dropping in for a just a day or for longer – even the whole week, if they so choose - to spend time working through development issues with members of my team.... Read more →

Triangulating an AutoCAD polyface mesh from a set of points using .NET

A huge thank you to Zeljko Gjuranic for providing this code for a guest post. The code is based on a paper of Zeljko’s that was published in issue 11 of KoG magazine. The original paper is available in Croatian with an abstract in English. The code in this post asks the user to select a set of points and then creates a polyface mesh by using Delaunay triangulation on those points. [As we’re creating a polyface mesh we’re limited to 32,767 vertices. This is a known limitation when using the PolyFaceMesh object: with the new SubDMesh object in... Read more →

Overruling AutoCAD 2010’s entity display and explode using IronPython

To continue my investigations into IronPython and the fun I’m having with overrules, I decided to to port my most recent C# overrule implementation across to IronPython. I’ve also been trying to do the same for IronRuby, but – so far – without luck. Please refer back to one of the previous IronPython posts for the PYLOAD command implementation needed to load our Python script into AutoCAD. Here are the contents of our .py file: import clr path = 'C:\\Program Files\\Autodesk\\AutoCAD 2010\\' clr.AddReferenceToFileAndPath(path + 'acdbmgd.dll') clr.AddReferenceToFileAndPath(path + 'acmgd.dll') import Autodesk import Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime as ar import Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices as aas import... Read more →

DevTV: AutoCAD VBA to .NET Migration Basics

As mentioned in a comment on a recent post, Stephen Preston, our DevTech Americas Manager, has put together a useful tool and accompanying DevTV session to help people migrate their VBA code to VB.NET. The resultant code uses COM Interop to call into AutoCAD. AutoCAD VBA to .NET Migration Basics view download (44.3 Mb) Stephen considers this presentation, and the migration tool itself, to be in draft form. If you have feedback, please do send Stephen an email. Read more →

AutoCAD Exchange, new blogs, webcast recordings posted

This post is a miscellaneous update on things I’ve put off announcing because of all the fun I’ve been having with AutoCAD 2010’s Overrule API. First up is the AutoCAD Exchange, a new site devoted to people working with, you guessed it, AutoCAD. It’s stocked with lots of useful and fun content, as well as providing social networking capabilities (be sure to add me as a contact via the Networking area of the site). Next is Without a Net, a blog hosted by an old friend of mine, Tom Stoeckel, along with esteemed colleagues Tom Bradley and Dan Scales.... Read more →

SDI, the end is nigh

Sorry if the title is a little abrupt, but it seemed too good an opportunity to show off my now appalling poetry skills. [Something almost no-one knows (well, OK, knew) about me is that, at the age of 8, I was the youngest winner of a poetry competition. I went along to the King’s Lynn Arts Centre (known back then as The Fermoy Centre) to recite my poem, “Words Inside my Pencil”, to a packed – at least it seemed so, at the time – audience of the various winners’ parents. Anyway, as you can see it was all... Read more →

Overruling explode in AutoCAD 2010 using .NET

I am really starting to love the new Overrule API in AutoCAD 2010, and I still feel as though I’m just scratching the surface. This question came in overnight from Danny Polkinhorn (thanks, Danny! :-) : It's exciting to see a very usable implementation of 'custom' objects in .NET. Obviously, this implementation protects what could be proprietary business intelligence from being sent around, but it brings up a question. What process would you use to 'explode' these elements so that you could send the drawing to someone without your code, but with the custom elements in it? My first... Read more →

Optimized overruling in AutoCAD 2010 using .NET

In the last post we looked at some code that attaches additional data to individual entities, allowing them to be drawn independently with different visual properties via the new Overrule API in AutoCAD 2010. A couple of comments – one from Qun, who provided the original F# sample, and one from Tony Tanzillo – have prompted me to optimize the code somewhat. Tony pointed out, very validly, that as the previous code registers its overrule against Drawable objects it will get called for every entity (and various objects besides) which could clearly impact performance. Qun pointed me to some... Read more →

Let’s get specific: customizing the display of individual AutoCAD objects using .NET

In the last post we looked at some C# code to customize the display of all Lines and Circles within AutoCAD, adding a thickness (or a diameter) to make them look more like pipes. This was, in turn, based on this F# post. The previous code implemented an overrule that allowed us to insert our own graphics for every instance of the types of object we cared about. [A quick note on the previous implementation: we actually register the overrule to be called for all “drawable” objects: the inheritance tree for the Circle class is: Drawable –> DBObject –>... Read more →

Customizing the display of standard AutoCAD objects using .NET

The code in this post is a direct port of the F# code in this previous post, which was entered by Qun Lu in the recent F# programming contest. Someone – very validly - commented on the fact the post involved both a new language and a new API, which was probably pushing things a little from a learning perspective. :-) Without repeating my various comments in the previous post, I will reiterate the fact that this API is extremely interesting for developers who wish to customize the appearance and behaviour of standard AutoCAD objects without going through the... Read more →

Jigging an AutoCAD solid using IronRuby and .NET (well, almost)

In the last post I introduced a very simple “Hello World!” IronRuby application working with AutoCAD, just as I’d previously done with IronPython. My idea for this post was to take the code from my second IronPython post – which showed how to jig an AutoCAD solid from IronPython – and get it working with IronRuby, forcing me to learn a little more Ruby in the process. All started out well: to convert the basic syntax from Python to Ruby was straightforward, and I have a definite liking for the syntax of the Ruby language. Especially when working with... Read more →

Using IronRuby with AutoCAD

[I’ve now started pushing links to my posts out through Twitter, even if I haven’t gone quite so far as to abandon TypePad (yes, it was an April Fools’ joke, in case anyone missed the closing comment :-)]. Having spent some time looking into Python, I decided to give Ruby – another popular scrip ting language and one with an “Iron” implementation allowing you to work with .NET – the same treatment. From what I can tell – and I’m really a newbie in both these languages – there is relatively little to separate the two: both Ruby and... Read more →

Through the Interface moving from TypePad to Twitter

As of tomorrow, I will be transitioning away from posting to this site via TypePad in favour of micro-blogging via the increasingly-popular Twitter service. If you would like to follow me on Twitter, you can do so via http://twitter.com/keanw. Any lengthy monologues (and yes, I know I’m prone to these, from time to time :-) will either be condensed down to 140 characters or serialized over multiple tweets. The same holds for code samples: I expect this to force me to be more disciplined about keeping my code succinct (although on the downside I plan on completely eradicating comments... Read more →