Through the Interface

June’s Plugin of the Month: Dimension Patrol

Thanks again to Stephen Preston, our DevTech Americas Manager, for developing this very useful little utility. You can find an earlier version of this code – which I’d converted to C# and extended to cover text entities – in this previous post. June’s Plugin of the Month is now live: Dimension Patrol for AutoCAD. This one was kicked off by a suggestion from Shaan Hurley: a tool for designers and CAD Managers to quickly check drawings for dimensions with overridden text (which, logically enough, could mean the dimensions no longer accurately reflect their associated distance or value). Sometimes the... Read more →

There’s still time to fill out the 2010 API wishlist surveys

As mentioned in this previous post, the following API wishlist surveys are currently live: AutoCAD® AutoCAD® Civil 3D® AutoCAD® Map 3D® Revit® Autodesk Inventor® Autodesk Navisworks® We’ve had around 500 responses across the various surveys, but to give a few more people the chance to respond, we’ve extended the deadline until June 11th, 2010. To give you an idea of how the voting is looking so far, here’s a summary of the responses against the survey’s “money” question (5. From the following list of possible AutoCAD API enhancements, please choose three areas that you recommend we make our top... Read more →

Using Photosynth to generate a few sparse point clouds

While on my way to San Francisco, last weekend, I had a 7-hour layover in Washington D.C. Given the amount of time available to me I decided to head from Dulles into the centre of the city and do something fun: I ended up choosing to visit the Natural History Museum at The Smithsonian, which proved to be really interesting even to my somewhat bleary eyes. Part of my motivation was to try to capture something for bringing into Photosynth (as I’d borrowed my wife’s digital SLR for taking some snaps at the wedding I was attending in Las... Read more →

The end of a very interesting week

One of my oldest friends – we’ve known each other since we were three years old – decided to get married in Las Vegas this week. My friend, his fiancée and his parents flew across from the UK, but others of us flew across from Switzerland and even New Zealand to attend the event. Now between Autodesk University and other events, I’ve probably averaged a week in Las Vegas a year for the last decade. So I didn’t really want to spend a full week in Vegas, but neither did I want to make the trip across for just... Read more →

Voting open for AU 2010 sessions

I’ve submitted three sessions for this year’s Autodesk University: Getting to know AutoCAD's Plugins of the Month (a 60-minute virtual class, session ID 1681) Synopsis: The Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) team has been publishing "Plugins of the Month" on Autodesk Labs for over a year. Each of these plugins extends an Autodesk products in a useful or interesting way, and is provided with full source code! Attend this session for an introduction to the various AutoCAD plugins that have been published (with a brief mention of those published for other products). We will take a detailed look at the... Read more →

Adding keyword handling to AutoCAD .NET’s GetSelection()

I received this question by email over the weekend: How does the Editor-Method GetSelection works with Keywords. I can’t get it to work and there are no information found in the internet (nothing in your blog, nothing in forums). Here’s some C# code that does just this: using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; namespace MyApplication { public class Commands { [CommandMethod("SELKW")] public void GetSelectionWithKeywords() { Document doc = Application.DocumentManager.MdiActiveDocument; Editor ed = doc.Editor; // Create our options object PromptSelectionOptions pso = new PromptSelectionOptions(); // Add our keywords pso.Keywords.Add("FIrst"); pso.Keywords.Add("Second"); // Set our prompts to include our keywords string kws... Read more →

Populating a tree view inside AutoCAD with sheet set data using .NET - Part 2

I didn’t realise when I created the last post (with code borrowed from Fenton) that this would become a multi-part series – otherwise I’d clearly have called the earlier post “Part 1”. :-) A comment from Harold Comerro requested information on getting more from the DST than was previously shown. Today’s post extends the previous code to create two different slices of the data: a “Sheets View” and a “Database View”, both hosted in the same palette set. Here’s the updated C# code: using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Windows; using acApp = Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using ACSMCOMPONENTS18Lib; using System.Windows.Forms;... Read more →

More translated AutoCAD VBA to VB.NET Migration DevTVs

In this previous post I mentioned a couple of additional translations of the VBA migration DevTV that were in progress. Here is an updated list of the various ones we now have available, including links to German, Spanish and Japanese versions: 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) German view download (42.4 MB) Spanish view download (52.9 MB) Japanese MP4 download (66.9 MB) WMV download (78.5 MB) A big thanks to Augusto Gonçalves, Jeremy Tammik, Shigekazu Saito and Katsuaki Takamizawa for... Read more →

API wishlist surveys for Autodesk products

This year’s API wishlist surveys for the following products are now ready: AutoCAD® AutoCAD® Civil 3D® AutoCAD® Map 3D® Revit® Autodesk Inventor® Autodesk Navisworks® My team runs these surveys year on year, and year on year Autodesk’s various Engineering teams deliver upon them (and not just AutoCAD’s). It really is worth providing us with your input: it’s one of the most direct ways to influence the direction of the Autodesk products you customize or for which you develop applications. Tell us which APIs are most important to you: your feedback will not fall on deaf ears. And if you... Read more →

Populating a tree view inside AutoCAD with sheet set data using .NET

A big thank you to Fenton Webb, from DevTech Americas, for providing the code which was the basis for this post. Thanks, Fents! :-) Fenton sent a version of this code recently to an ADN member who was interested in duplicating the information shown in AutoCAD’s Sheet Set Manager inside a custom, palette-hosted tree-view dialog. Fenton’s version made use of WPF: I’ve dumbed it down a little to use WinForms, but may do a follow-up post using WPF (although the WPF TreeView doesn’t appear to support data-binding, so I may well decide not to bother). I have made some... Read more →

.NET Reflector Pro discount

We recently made an offer available to members of the Autodesk Developer Network, to get a 10% discount on the purchase price of .NET Reflector Pro, a tool I’ve talked about a few times before. Having discussed this with Red Gate Software, the providers of .NET Reflector Pro, I’m now extending this offer to readers of this blog. For a limited time only – until the end of May 2010 – you can also purchase .NET Reflector Pro at a 10% discount. I’ve found this tool to be very useful, especially when working with AutoCAD’s .NET API. For more... Read more →

May’s Plugin of the Month: Spiro for AutoCAD

This one is a bit of an experiment: our first “fun” Plugin of the Month (fun in that it doesn’t serve a serious work-related purpose that I can think of :-). I’ve post earlier versions of the code to this blog, but thought I’d post and share the latest & greatest. Scott has kindly announced the plugin’s availability already over on It’s Alive in the Lab. This is our first Plugin on the Month written in F#, which means an additional DLL needs to be copied with the plugin itself. Other than that the application should work just as... Read more →