Through the Interface

Importing Photosynth point clouds into AutoCAD 2011 – Part 4

In the previous posts in this series we introduced a command that downloaded and imported point clouds from Photosynth.net, we introduced a WinForms user interface on top of it and then replaced that UI with one implemented using WPF. As threatened last time, we’re now going to make some efficiency improvements in the original command implementation. In our previous implementation we were blindly asking for files, one after the other, and using failure to indicate when we’d reached the end. Which was fine, but it limited us in a few ways: we could not reliably parallelize this otherwise highly... Read more →

"AutoCAD 2011 New APIs" webcast recording

The recording of the previously announced “AutoCAD 2011 New APIs” webcast held on April 13th, 2010 is now available for download (19.8MB). We’ve also completed a much-needed restructuring of our online session information. Links to downloads of previously recorded sessions were available via our API training schedule (also available from http://autodesk.com/apitraining –> Schedule). They have now been granted their own, well-deserved page: [You’ll notice the recording of the Inventor 2011 New APIs is also live – the Revit 2011 version will be posted soon, as will the one for AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011 (once the session has been held,... Read more →

Hitting breakpoints in .NET Class Libraries while debugging with Visual Studio 2010

This question has popped up a few times since Visual Studio 2010’s recent launch. I received it by email overnight from Roland Cox, which is interesting as I’d already planned this post for today. Do you know how to debug AutoCAD and a custom add in using Visual Studio 2010? What settings do I need to make? I know the add is getting loaded (the code runs in AutoCAD) but I can't set a breakpoint (it shows a empty circle saying that VS doesn't have the assembly loaded). I first saw this issue raised a few times on threads... Read more →

Importing Photosynth point clouds into AutoCAD 2011 - Part 3

As alluded to in the last post in this series (ignoring a related post that dealt with user interface integration) I wasn’t really happy with some of the tricks I needed in the WinForms version to try and make a coherent user interface for tracking accessed point clouds in a hosted Photosynth browsing session. This post replaces the WinForms UI with one implemented using WPF, and in fact might also have been titled “Using data-binding in WPF to track a list of objects with associated thumbnails” or something to that effect. :-) What I’ve done in the new version... Read more →

Countdown to DevCamps 2010

Once again I’m a little late to the party: Shaan, Volker, Harlan, Brian and Jeremy have all beaten me to it, but perhaps this somewhat later post will be a useful reminder for people. Hopefully, anyway. Our first DevCamps were held in September 2007. We followed them less than a year later with another set of DevCamps in June 2008. After holding these two sets of events so closely together we learned – and heard from attendees – that a better frequency for these events would be every other year. And that’s certainly our plan moving forward. Which means... Read more →

64-bit driver for Microsoft Access databases

A big thanks to Stephen Preston for passing on this very interesting information. Stephen is one of the “volcanically challenged” members of my team, so fingers crossed he’ll be able to get a flight across to the UK in the coming days. Aside from Stephen’s delayed trip back to the motherland, the recent travel disruptions have also impacted an Inventor API training class being held in Moscow (which will go ahead with a back-up trainer) and extended another team member’s vacation in the Philippines. The lack of a native 64-bit driver for ODBC, ADO, OLE DB, etc. access to... Read more →

Translated AutoCAD VBA to VB.NET Migration DevTVs

To help people who don’t master English with their efforts to migrate their code from VBA to VB.NET, my team has been busy translating our existing AutoCAD VBA to VB.NET Migration Basics DevTV session into other languages. Here are the languages we have, so far (including an updated English version): English view download (44.7 MB) Chinese view download (88.9 MB) French view download (39 MB) Portuguese view download (80.3 MB) Russian view download (39.3 MB) A big thanks to Augusto Gonçalves, Xiaodong Liang, Philippe Leefsma and Marat Mirgaleev for their hard work on these sessions. German and Spanish versions... Read more →

April's plugin of the Month: XrefStates for AutoCAD

Yes, I know, I know – we’re halfway through the month, already. This plugin has been live on Autodesk Labs since the beginning of the month, but I’ve been a little distracted by April Fools’ jokes, fooling around with Photosynth point clouds as well as finishing up some internal activities which always tend to take time away from blogging at this time of year. Anyway, I’ve been remiss talking about this very cool application, but at least Scott was there to announce it on day one. The application was developed by Glenn Ryan, and there are a number of... Read more →

Adding to AutoCAD’s Application Menu and Quick Access Toolbar using .NET

I received this question from Vikas Hajela a few days ago: I am developing a plugin in C#, which will add a link in Quick Access Toolbar in AutoCAD. […] My problem is that I don’t know how to add a link into existing Quick Access Toolbar and Menu Bar in AutoCAD using ObjectARX SDK and C#. Also I want that on click of that link it should open a new window. We’re going to look at some code that – on initialization of the application – adds an item to AutoCAD’s “Big A” Application Menu and to the... Read more →

Importing Photosynth point clouds into AutoCAD 2011 - Part 2

In the last post we looked at a command to allow importing of Photosynth point clouds into AutoCAD. In this post we’ll put a GUI on the front end, to avoid people having to sniff network traffic to determine the location of the appropriate files on the Photosynth servers. The application is actually relative simple: it hosts a browser control that gets pointed at the Photosynth web-site, allowing the user to browse through Photosynths. As point clouds are detected (as the browser has some handy events notifying of the HTTP traffic generated by the embedded Photosynth application, and we... Read more →

Importing Photosynth point clouds into AutoCAD 2011 - Part 1

For some background into what this series is all about, see this previous post. I’ve been tracking Photosynth for some time, but only recently became aware of its use of point-clouds on the back-end and the possibility of extracting this information from the site. I first got inspired by Binary Millenium’s video of the process they’ve used along with the Python script they’ve provided on their website to extract the points from a Photosynth point cloud file. I converted this code to C# (without realising there was already a version out there – I should really have done better... Read more →

Child’s Play: a new tool for generating 3D models from children’s drawings

On the heels of hot products such as Photosynth, which generates 3D point clouds from 2D photos, expect to see (any day, now) a new product on Autodesk Labs called Child’s Play. This innovative, cloud-based design engine processes images drawn by children and cranks out 3D models to be imported into AutoCAD or Revit. We've had a team of PhDs in our Shanghai R&D centre spending man-years implementing cutting-edge algorithms that can effectively take any simple line drawing - irrespective of your child's ability with a pen - and create a 3D model of a house meeting local building... Read more →