Through the Interface

It’s All Just Ones and Zeros: new Autodesk Vault developer blog

I’d like to extend a warm welcome to the Autodesk developer blogosphere to Doug Redmond, who has recently started a blog focused on programming and administering Autodesk Vault, It’s All Just Ones and Zeros. Doug is a long-time contributor to Autodesk’s development community, whether helping my team deal with complex API issues or presenting the Vault API at ADN events and at AU, he has a boundless passion for helping people customizing and developing with Autodesk Vault. If you’re interested in working deeply with Vault technology – or are already doing so – then I’m sure that Doug’s blog... Read more →

Ask me questions on the AutoCAD Exchange!

I’m this week’s “expert” over on the AutoCAD Exchange: I don’t know whether people visiting that site will be interested in asking programming-related questions, but as I’m routinely re-directing support questions I receive by email or as blog comments across to the ADN site or to our discussion groups, I thought I’d point this blog’s readership at the chance to get questions answered without me wriggling out of them. :-) Go on – ask me a question! Read more →

Clipboard Manager: October’s ADN Plugin of the Month, now live on Autodesk Labs

As Scott is leaving on a well-deserved sabbatical, he has gone ahead and posted our next Plugin of the Month a few days ahead of schedule. Here’s a link to Scott’s post announcing the tool. This is a very cool little application developed by Mark Dubbelaar from Australia. Mark has been drafting/designing with AutoCAD for the last 10+ years and, during this time, has used a variety of programming languages to customize AutoCAD: LISP, VBA and now VB.NET. Mark was inspired by the “clipboard ring” functionality that used to be in Microsoft Office (at least I say “used to... Read more →

Taking a screenshot of a user-selected portion of a drawing using .NET

Following on from this recent post – and inspired by a question we received recently from a developer – I decided to extend the previous code to allow a user to select a portion of a drawing they would like to save to a file or place on the clipboard. This is actually a really useful tool for me when I’m writing this blog, so there was certainly a degree of self-interest involved. :-) The technique shown in today’s post is actually pretty handy for other situations: it’s quite common to want to transform a point from drawing coordinates... Read more →

Adding block and xline offset support to the OffsetInXref Plugin of the Month

In response to September’s Plugin of the Month - which Shaan has very kindly posted about over on Between the Lines – a few people have requested enhancements to the OffsetInXref tool. Two came up, in particular: The ability to offset the contents of blocks, not just xrefs The ability to enable the XLINE command’s offset functionality to work with xrefs (and blocks) The changes to enable these enhancements are very minor, which is always a pleasant surprise. Well, in the first case it isn’t much of a surprise: xrefs are actually just a special kind of block, so... Read more →

Searching the web from inside AutoCAD using the Bing API and .NET

I know, I know... I said I’d be posting on IronRuby, but yet again I got distracted . Back to that next week, I promise. The good news is that, once again, I managed to get distracted by something pretty cool. :-) Earlier in the week I’d stumbled across an article mentioning the Bing API (currently in version 2.0), which allows you to perform programmatic web searches using various web-service related technologies, such as REST, JSON & SOAP. I played around with that, for a while, importing the Bing web service into different versions of Visual Studio (both of... Read more →

Jigging an AutoCAD solid using IronRuby and .NET (yes, finally)

Back in April I posted an IronRuby sample that I had hoped would cause AutoCAD to jig a box in 3D, just like its IronPython counterpart. The sample didn’t work with IronRuby 0.3, but recently David Blackmon got in touch to let me know he had a version of the code working with IronRuby 0.9. Now that I’ve started preparing for my upcoming AU class, AutoCAD® .NET: Developing for AutoCAD® Using IronPython and IronRuby, I decided to take a closer look at the update to IronRuby and more specifically at the changes to the code David made to get... Read more →

Updated versions of the AutoCAD .NET Wizard & Labs

As mentioned a few months ago, we’ve been working on a project wizard for AutoCAD .NET development. The official version of this tool is now available via the AutoCAD Developer Center (a direct link to the download can be found here). We incorporated a number of enhancement requests received from people working with the previous, draft version, but I don’t have an exhaustive list of the updates, unfortunately. If you provided feedback, thank you for taking the time to do so, and hopefully the issue you faced has been addressed in this updated version (and please do let us... Read more →

Autodesk Search Beta

As Jeremy Tammik reported a few weeks ago, Autodesk Search Beta is now available. Here are the results of my quick “vanity search” on this site… this isn’t really egosurfing in its purist sense (although I admit I do Google my name pretty regularly – just to see who’s quoting my blog :-), it’s more about making sure that this blog is being indexed. Honest. Sure enough, a number of posts on this site came up in the results, which is encouraging. On a somewhat related note, I’ve been waiting for some time for our blogs to be indexed... Read more →

Taking screenshots of AutoCAD’s main and drawing windows using .NET

I received a comment on this previous post: Hi Kean, I tried to develop a routine based on this post but I found 2 things that I'd like to solve if possible. Your routine is just not usable for larger drawings (takes way to long). Also, your routine does not work properly in paper space. Please, don't get me wrong, I appreciate all the work you've put into this blog. I just desperately need to come up with a solution for snapshots that work on large drawings, that work in paper/model space and that use the current viewstyle settings... Read more →

Creating and overriding AutoCAD dimension styles using .NET

A request came in by email during last week’s vacation: I have been looking around to find a way about creating Dimension Style Overrides, but have not really had any success at anything yet. I have created program in which I do create several dimension styles, but I just keep getting lost with the overrides. This seemed like a really good topic to cover, so this post contains some simple code that to create a dimension style and two nearly-identical linear dimensions: both use our newly-created dimension style but the second of the two also contains some Dimension Style... Read more →

OffsetInXref: September’s ADN Plugin of the Month, now live on Autodesk Labs

As announced on Scott Sheppard’s blog, It’s Alive in the Lab, you can now find the inaugural ADN Plugin of the Month available for download on Autodesk Labs. I introduced the concept a little over a month ago – thanks to all of you who responded! – and we’ve decided to get things started with OffsetInXref, an AutoCAD plugin allowing you to offset geometry contained in external references without first having to explode them. The code for this plugin can be found in these previous posts on this blog, as well as with the plugin download itself. The inspiration... Read more →