Through the Interface

Mac Attack

Well, I’ve finally taken the plunge and ordered a MacBook Pro. I have very little experience with Apple products – other than owning an aging iPod Photo and having bought an iPod Touch for my wife – so this is quite a departure for me. I’m far from being ready to call myself “a Mac” rather than “a PC”, but if I’m to talk intelligently about working with AutoCAD for Mac then it was bound to happen, sooner or later. I ordered the 15” model with a screen and processor upgrade. I’m very curious to see how it performs.... Read more →

Revolving an AutoCAD solid using .NET

Thanks to Philippe Leefsma, from our DevTech team in Europe, for providing the code for this post. Philippe kindly based his code on that provided in this previous post, which made it especially easy for me to format for posting. Thanks, Philippe! :-) In the post linked to above we saw some code defining a SAP (SweepAlongPath) command. This post extends that to implement a complementary RAA (RevolveAroundAxis) command. Philippe’s original code asked the user for a line to define the axis of revolution. I generalised the code slightly to accept a curve: as we’re only using the vector... Read more →

Win a free Premier Pass for AU Virtual 2010 worth $139!

The first 5 people to email me with the topic of the virtual session I’m presenting at this year’s AUv event will receive a free Premier Pass for AU Virtual 2010 worth $139. To even the playing field somewhat and to emphasize the global nature of the AUv event, each winner will have to come from a different country. Please make sure it’s obvious which country you’re from when you email me. I’ll update this post as the passes get allocated (indicating which countries the winners were from). I expect them to go quickly, so apologies in advance to... Read more →

Getting to know my Eye-Fi card in preparation for AU 2010

As part of my preparation for a class I’m presenting at AU, Point Clouds on a Shoestring (AC427-4), I bought myself a new toy a couple of weeks ago: an Eye-Fi Pro X2 memory card. This very cool little device is much more than a high capacity SD card: it has an in-built Wi-Fi chip that allows it to connect to your local Wi-Fi infrastructure (whether via a wireless router, access points or an ad-hoc connection to your PC) and will automatically upload the images you’re taking to a folder on your system and (optionally) to your favourite photo... Read more →

An updated version of RegDL available

As mentioned in the last post, I decided to update the RegDL tool – which can be used to create demand-loading entries for an AutoCAD .NET module from, for instance, an installer – to support optional logging to a file. If you now run RegDL.exe with the /log command-line switch, then the application will now create a text file, reglog.txt, in the executable’s folder with the high-level results of the registration (with hopefully some useful detail in case of failure). Here are the main, updated files, Program.cs: using System.Reflection; using System.IO; using System; using DemandLoading; namespace RegDL { class... Read more →

Building an Installer – Part 3

In the first part in this series, we looked at getting our basic installer to install files and in the second part we focused on checking and modifying the Registry. In this part we’re going to finish up our installer by tweaking the user interface. Let’s get started with some fundamentals: the name of the MSI file itself. This can be modified via the Installer project’s property page (which I pulled up by right-clicking the project in the Solution Explorer and selecting “Properties”): A pretty simple one, but one that’s worth making, nonetheless. Let’s go ahead and spruce up... Read more →

Building an Installer – Part 2

In the last post we created a basic installer to deploy our product files and source into a user-specified location. In this post we’ll look at the Registry-related activities that need to happen from our installer. One of the files we added to the install project was the RegDL executable. We’re going to add some custom actions which use this executable to create/remove our demand-loading Registry entries on install/uninstall. The advantage of this approach is that we don’t need to duplicate information in an installation script that’s already stored in our .NET assemblies: RegDL queries an assembly programmatically for... Read more →

Building an Installer – Part 1

It’s been a long time since I’ve dabbled with software deployment technology, which is absolutely fine by me (in my experience installation issues are some of the gnarliest to deal with, so – presumably like the majority of developers, with apologies to Install specialists – I prefer not having to care about them, myself). But last week I had to put together a few installers - as an internal test - for some of our Plugins of the Month, and ended up deciding the process was worth documenting, especially where it relates to the RegDL component I created and... Read more →

Photo Scene Editor Competition

I’ve talked about the Photo Scene Editor tool a few times (on this blog and in a DevCast), so hopefully you’re already familiar with the capabilities of this fun product. This is really just to let you know that the Autodesk Labs team is running a competition that ends in a couple of weeks, on September 24th. Give it a try, and have the chance to win a signed (by Autodesk CEO, Carl Bass) copy of 3ds Max or 3ds Max Design plus a 64GB iPad! Read more →

More fun with QR Codes: encoding different types of data inside AutoCAD

After a break of a week, I thought it was time to take the QR Code application a little further, after our previous versions creating basic QR codes at a fixed location, using user-specified corners and using a jig. The code in this post adds quite a bit of functionality to the application: The ability to encode various types of data Calendar events Contact information Email addresses Geo-locations Phone numbers Plain text URLs The ability to edit QR Codes The data used to create the QR Code is attached to the raster image as XData and gets used for... Read more →

AutoCAD WS

As promised, I spent some time talking to Tal Weiss, Senior Software Development Manager for AutoCAD WS, to understand a little more about this technology and how it’s evolving. Many thanks to Tal for taking the time to share this interesting information with this blog’s readership. [I’ve formatted the below discussion as a Q&A, but with extensive editing and paraphrasing.] What is AutoCAD WS? The goal for AutoCAD WS is to extend the AutoCAD experience to the web as well as to emerging platforms and devices – mobile, tablets, etc. We already had Project Butterfly working in the browser... Read more →

September’s Plugin of the Month: DigSigStamp

Yesterday Scott Sheppard announced the availability of this plugin over on It’s Alive in the Lab. We originally received a request for this Plugin of the Month some time ago. Fenton Webb, from our DevTech Americas team, developed the initial version using an ObjectARX custom entity – as the requester required support for versions of AutoCAD prior to 2010 – but for this public release, Stephen Preston went ahead and re-implemented the mechanism in a .NET application using the Overrules API introduced in AutoCAD 2010. This plugin basically allows you to see graphically when an AutoCAD drawing is digitally... Read more →

AutoCAD for Mac

Well, it’s finally been announced. After months (probably ev en more) of intense speculation, Autodesk has just announced that after a break of several (perhaps 15, depending on how you count them) releases, we’re planning to deliver a version of AutoCAD that once again works natively on Mac machines. [For some history regarding the original Mac port of AutoCAD, see the first part of my interview with John Walker – you’ll need to scroll way down or just search for “Macintosh”.] To clarify something about this release, it is not AutoCAD LT – it has full 3D editing capabilities... Read more →