Through the Interface

Batch-processing AutoCAD drawings from LISP without SDI (take 2)

In this recent post we looked at an approach combining AutoLISP with a script generated on-the-fly to get around the fact that (command "_.OPEN" …) does nothing when SDI == 0. As mentioned in a comment in the post, I realised that the approach of using a single master script to do this is more prone to failure: a number of commands can cause scripts to stop executing, for instance, so it would be better practice to minimise the operations contained in a particular script to increase the application’s fault tolerance. This modified approach was suggested by a member... Read more →

And now for a real birthday…

Our first daughter, Anokhi, was born yesterday evening at 22:46 CET, weighing 3.38 kg and measuring 47.5 cm in length. Her older brothers Kalan and Zephyr were thrilled to meet her today. I’ll be on vacation properly from next week - spending time with our newly super-sized family - but will probably manage to squeeze in another post or two before mother and baby get home from the hospital. Read more →

Batch-processing AutoCAD drawings from LISP without SDI

As mentioned in this previous post, there has been some discussion internally around the future of SDI. Given the change this will bring to applications, SDI is going to be around until we next deliberately choose to break binary application compatibility (something we just did with AutoCAD 2010 and typically try to do only every three releases). That said, SDI is very likely to go away at some point, so it does seem worth drilling further into the reasons for using it and trying to determine an appropriate way to remove current dependencies on it. Thanks to all of... Read more →

Happy birthday to me… happy birthday to me…

Well, happy birthday to “Through the Interface”, anyway. :-) 3 years, 394 posts and 2,559 comments later, TTIF is still going strong. In fact, it’s now the 2nd most visited Autodesk blog, after Shaan’s (some of our blogs with shorter posts publish their full content via RSS, so this doesn’t necessarily completely reflect the relative readership, but hey). Here’s a graph of the page hits over the last three years… I think the number on the Y-axis reflects the total page hits in a monthly window (at least that’s what seems to make sense). [I’m not too worried about... Read more →

A new project wizard for AutoCAD .NET development

Some of you may remember a philosophical question I raised in a post some time ago. The overall consensus of the feedback we received was to prioritise delivering code samples (given a choice between code samples and wizard-like code-generation tools). Which we are doing, both via the ADN site and our developer blogs… but that doesn’t mean some investment in code-generation tools isn’t also appropriate, from time-to-time. :-) Cyrille Fauvel, who manages the Media & Entertainment arm of DevTech but also occasionally works on technical activities that relate to our other products, has put together a new (currently draft)... Read more →

Highlighting named blocks using AutoCAD 2010’s overrule API from .NET

This is a nice sample provided by Stephen Preston, who manages DevTech’s Americas team. Stephen has put this together in anticipation of his upcoming AU class on the overrule API introduced in AutoCAD 2010. [I know the final class list has not yet been announced, but Stephen is co-owner of the Customization & Programming track at this year’s AU and presumably has the inside skinny on the selected classes. Which means he has a head-start on preparing his material, lucky fellow. :-)] The sample allows the user to enter a text string that it uses to highlight any block... Read more →

A learning path for newbie programmers

I’m working to develop a “learning path” for people who know one or more Autodesk products from a user perspective but are interested in getting more into programming them: perhaps during their engineering studies they took one or two programming classes (perhaps not), and now feel that implementing some level of automation would be beneficial to themselves or to their colleagues. Or perhaps their boss has just told them to find out how all this stuff works. Or – and this is an altogether more sobering alternative – they have recently lost their jobs and are contemplating a career... Read more →

Updated DevTV: AutoCAD VBA to .NET Migration Basics

Stephen Preston has updated his “AutoCAD VBA to .NET Migration Basics” DevTV session. I’ve updated the links in this previous post to point to the updated DevTV, as the original recording is likely to disappear during the coming days. Here’s an update from Stephen on what’s new in this version: New features of the migration tool: Automatically adds ‘ObjectDBX’ Type Library to created VB6 project file to ensure Autodesk.AutoCAD.Interop.Common classes are correctly identified (previously these came in as Autodesk.AutoCAD.Interop) Extra functionality to post-process your VB Express project for you: - Adds F5 startup application - Adds references to acmgd... Read more →

Registering AutoCAD commands with localized names using .NET

While I was preparing this recent post I put together a simple project which registered localized names for commands, to make sure they were picked up and used to create the appropriate demand-loading Registry keys. It was a little tricky to do this from the current documentation, so thankfully I had access to this DevNote on the ADN site which helped a great deal (this is only available to ADN members but don’t worry if you’re not one: this post should provide equivalent information and in certain ways goes beyond the original example). Anyway, it seemed a relevant topic... Read more →

Creating Fibonacci spirals in AutoCAD using F#

I recently stumbled across this post which inspired me to do something similar in AutoCAD (the fact that both posts cover Fibonacci spirals and use F# is about where the similarity ends - they do things quite differently). Fibonacci spirals are an approximation of the golden spiral, which for old timers out there will be reminiscent of the AutoCAD R12 (it was R12, wasn’t it?) design collateral - the same as this one from AME 2.1 - which I still find cool after all these years. :-) The first thing was to create a function that returns a portion... Read more →

Winner of the F# programming contest

Back at the beginning of the year I launched a programming contest for using F# with Autodesk products. A few months ago I introduced one of the winning entries showing how to use F# to implement Overrules in AutoCAD 2010. Now I’ve finally got around to unveiling the second winning entry. And the winner is… drumroll… Nada Amin, who entered her Master of Engineering project which uses F# with AutoCAD. Here is a description of the project from the MIT website: Micado: an AutoCAD plug-in for programmable microfluidic chips Programmable microfluidics, using multi-layer soft lithography, are lab-on-chip systems that... Read more →