Through the Interface

Merry Christmas, one and all!

Joyeux Noël, 圣诞快乐, Frohe Weihnachten, عيد ميلاد مجيد, Nollaig Shona, メリークリスマス, Nadolig Llawen, 즐거운 ... Read more →

Faceting AutoCAD curves using .NET

We have a number of candidate “Plugins of the Month” currently in the pipeline – including Inventor versions of Screenshot and Clipboard Manager as well as a tool to streamline batch plotting from AutoCAD – but unfortunately none were looking ready enough to count on for January’s posting. So yesterday I dipped into the plugins that have generously been proposed/provided by external parties and I put together a C# version of a tool submitted by our old friend Jon Smith from COINS. Jon provided a number of C++ tools that COINS has made available for free, one of which... Read more →

Post-AU wrap-up

Now that the dust has settled on my extended AU trip, here’s a quick post covering some of the fun. First, a nice little video on the AU experience, this year: Secondly, here’s how the keynote was experienced by people attending via AU Virtual: Thirdly, here’s a snapshot I took during the second broadcast of my F# session for which I was running the Q&A (this one was at 6:00am local time, so I was OK with not being inundated with questions, all things considered). And finally… as mentioned previously, the online aspect of this year’s event was one... Read more →

Creating non-rectangular paperspace viewports in AutoCAD using .NET

Thanks to Philippe Leefsma, from DevTech in Europe, for the ObjectARX code that inspired this post. In AutoCAD it’s possible to create non-rectangular viewports in paperspace using a variety of closed curve objects: circles, polylines (2D, 3D and lightweight), ellipses, regions, splines and faces. In this post we’re going to see some code that creates four new viewports in the paperspace of the active drawing using a subset of these objects: an Ellipse, a Circle, a closed Spline and a closed Polyline. Here’s the C# code: using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Geometry; namespace ViewportCreation {... Read more →

My Autodesk University 2009 classes available via AU Online

I’ve arrived at the end of my AU+East Asia tour, having spent the last 2 weeks in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Tokyo, Seoul and now Beijing. My blog is blocked by the Great Firewall of China, so while I can post this content via Typepad I can’t see the results (although I’m told I should be able to VPN into our Singapore office to bypass this restriction – I’ll give that a try, later on). Later today (and today is currently Friday December 11th in China :-) you should be able to gain access to the sessions I delivered... Read more →

Command-line scripting of IronPython code in AutoCAD

This post was heavily inspired by the code presented by my old friend Albert Szilvasy during his excellent AU class on using .NET 4.0 with AutoCAD. Albert took a different approach to the one I’ve previously adopted (which turns out also to have been suggested by Albert, when I look back at my original post), and created a palette to host IronPython code inside AutoCAD, enabling the ability to enter code directly in AutoCAD rather than relying on an external text file. In this post we’ll take Albert’s technique and implement a command-line interface for querying and executing IronPython... Read more →

Asynchronous messages in F# and AutoCAD

I’ve now crossed the international date line (giving up a big portion of my weekend, but that’s life) and landed in Tokyo. Tomorrow I head on to Seoul and then to Beijing for the end of the week. In many ways a change of pace from the week in Vegas, but in other ways it’s more of the same (fun, that is :-). In this previous post we looked at some code to retrieve and process RSS information from various blogs using an agent-based message passing architecture. The code wasn’t completely asynchronous or parallelised, though, as we fired off... Read more →

The Evolution of Autodesk University

I was really impressed with this year’s AU. Yes, there were fewer people than last year (although our ADN session on Monday ended up having very similar attendance, interestingly), but it didn’t feel smaller: it felt bigger. Aside from any technological shift at the product level – and cloud computing was very much talked about by Carl Bass and Jeff Kowalski – this was the year that AU spread its wings and embraced attendees around the world without them having to travel to Las Vegas. I knew AU Virtual was coming, but I didn’t anticipate how compelling an experience... Read more →

Update from AU 2009 and December’s Plugin of the Month

Well, so far, so good! We had a great ADN session on Monday, before AU proper kicked off yesterday. Lots of opportunities to talk with old friends and new. It’s always fun to find out what people are doing with our technology and hopefully to help address some of the snags they’ve hit along the way. Yesterday started with Albert Szilvasy’s .NET 4.0 session, which showed some great techniques for implementing script execution in AutoCAD and tied in very well with the session I’m presenting today on IronPython and IronRuby. I then went off to record my AU Virtual... Read more →