Through the Interface

Interviews with ADN members

Back at last year’s AU, my manager (Jim Quanci) and I were asked to interview members of the Autodesk Developer Network for the AutoCAD Exchange site. Here are a couple of those interviews that I came across on YouTube, both with long-time Autodesk development partners. First up is an interview with Rob Smith from SprinkCAD. And now Jim interviews Christian Dubuc from 20-20 Technologies. Overall I do prefer preparing written interviews: with a video interview I find it hard to listen, think and then talk, especially when the interviews are unscripted and shot in one take, as these were.... Read more →

AutoCAD .NET Developer’s Guide now available online

Well, pretty much as soon as I mention it, I get informed of its availability: http://www.autodesk.com/autocad-net-developers-guide Enjoy! :-) Read more →

API wishlist surveys: a reminder and some encouragement

In case some of you out there haven’t yet completed one or more of this year’s API Wishlist Surveys (and thanks to all of you who have – we have already gone way past the number of responses for previous years) I thought I’d post a gentle reminder and hopefully motivate a few more people to contribute by describing how they’ve helped influence our API development process. So first for the reminder: the deadline is currently at the end of this week, on July 31st, 2009. As mentioned, the response rate this year has been very strong, so we... Read more →

Providing information on AutoCAD objects in a tooltip using .NET

One of the responses to my last post on the “Plugin of the Month” asked about showing information on an AutoCAD drawing object via a tooltip. Other than using the standard rollover tooltip properties mechanism, as shown in this previous post, the best way to achieve this is via a PointMonitor. In the below C# code we check which object ore objects are being hovered over, get information about those objects and add them to the tooltip. using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Geometry; public class PointMonitorTooltips { [CommandMethod("SM")] public static void StartMonitor() { Editor ed... Read more →

Coming soon to Autodesk Labs… “Plugin of the Month”

This is less a pre-announcement of something we’re doing than it is a call for input (or perhaps a cry for help? ;-). After the summer we’re expecting to launch a new section of Autodesk Labs containing a “plugin of the month, brought to you by the Autodesk Developer Network”. The plugins we’re providing will be simple productivity enhancing tools and utilities that streamline the use of one of our products. The drivers behind this are to a) solve customer problems and b) demonstrate the benefits of investing in software customization. All the plugins we provide – with full... Read more →

Converting between C# and VB.NET

While I’m a huge fan of learning and using different programming languages – whether to train your brain to consider different potential solutions to a problem or to improve your job security and your ability to roll with the punches as the employment & technology landscapes shift – you will no doubt have noticed that the vast majority of my posts contain C# code. A lot of my early programming (both work and fun) was in BASIC (whether BBC BASIC, Level II BASIC on the TRS-80 or GW-BASIC) and some of the more involved internal projects I’ve worked on... Read more →

Adding a dynamic password property to an AutoCAD object using .NET

In this recent post we looked at adding custom editing capabilities for dynamic properties we’ve added via .NET. In the first example we looked at a “distance” property which provided a button allowing the user to select two points. In this post we’ll look at implementing a masked string property, such as one you would use for a password. I won’t repeat too much of the background information from the last post in this series: you should refer to that to understand the fundamentals (the fact that we’re basing this implementation on Cyrille Fauvel’s OPM .NET sample, that we’re... Read more →

API wishlist surveys for Autodesk products

It’s that time of year again (it’s actually a little later than when we published these surveys last year, but still). The following “Summer 2009” API wishlist surveys are now ready: AutoCAD® AutoCAD® Civil 3D® Revit® Autodesk® Inventor® Please do take the time to fill out the surveys for the products you customize or develop applications for. Our Engineering teams use the feedback you provide to prioritise our API development efforts: this is a great chance for you to have a direct impact on the direction we take in exposing APIs from our products. And if you (optionally) provide... Read more →

Adding a dynamic distance property to an AutoCAD object using .NET

Back in these previous posts, we introduced an ObjectARX module that exposed AutoCAD’s Property Palette to .NET (thanks again to Cyrille Fauvel for his work on this :-). In this post we’re going to build on this work to demonstrate how to integrate properties with more advanced editing controls into the Property Palette. [Note: this sample does not deal with persisting the data with an object. If you want to store your data with a particular object, I suggest taking a look at this previous post which demonstrates how to use Xdata to do so.] This code is being... Read more →

Triangulating an AutoCAD 3D solid from a set of points using .NET

As promised in this previous post, we’re now going to an update to Zeljko’s triangulation code which creates Solid3d objects with a user-specified depth from our SubDMesh. Here’s the C# code with the new/modified lines in red (here is the .cs source file). I’ve modified the code to reformat it and to provide the various options side-by-side in separate commands 1 using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; 2 using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices; 3 using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; 4 using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; 5 using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Geometry; 6 using System; 7 8 public class Triangulate 9 { 10 public bool circum( 11 double x1, double y1, double x2, 12 double y2,... Read more →

Reminder: free API webcast series on using WPF in your AutoCAD applications

As mentioned in this previous post, Fenton Webb is presenting a two-part series on using the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) in your AutoCAD .NET applications. The first session on June 2nd was recorded and the second is to be held next week on July 14th. You can register for upcoming webcasts - and access recordings for previous webcasts – via our API training schedule (which can also be accessed via this easy-to-remember URL: http://www.autodesk.com/apitraining). Read more →

ShareThis button added to Through the Interface

By popular request (well, in honesty I received one request via Twitter from @MattAnderson, but it seemed like such a good idea :-) I have added a ShareThis button to this blog’s right-sash navigation. Clicking this should now allow you to share the current page (whether the site itself or an individual post – whichever is loaded in the browser) via a social networking/bookmarking site or with an email/SMS/AIM recipient. I have to admit to not being up-to-speed with the latest & greatest ways people share information on the web, so I’ve just accepted the default options (which will... Read more →

LINQ post over on The Building Coder

While not necessarily relevant when working with AutoCAD data, it’s very common for people to want to make use of adjacent database systems when developing AutoCAD applications. For just this reason I’ve been meaning to post something on LINQ (and, in due course, PLINQ), but for now I recommend checking out this guest post from Joel Karr over on Jeremy Tammik’s The Building Coder. Thanks for the tip, Jeremy! :-) Read more →

Triangulating an AutoCAD sub-division mesh from a set of points using .NET

I’m just settling in after a week of very enjoyable paternity leave (thanks to all of you for your congratulatory messages :-). I have a few topics planned for the next few weeks, but in the meantime I’m going to post some code provided by our old friend Zeljko Gjuranic as a follow-up to this previous post. Zeljko responded to the suggestion that – rather than creating the limited PolyFaceMesh object – his code should instead create the more modern SubDMesh (an object introduced in AutoCAD 2010). I’ve taken Zeljko’s code and integrated it into the previous example, allowing... Read more →