Through the Interface

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Thank you all for reading and participating in this blog during 2010. It’s your comments and feedback that make it all worthwhile, at least from my perspective. (“If a blog post gets written and no-one’s around to read it, why bother spell-checking?” ;-) I’m heading off to the Alps this afternoon with my family: we’ve rented a chalet in Haute-Nendaz for the week between Christmas and New Year and so I’ll be fully offline until the first week of January. I hope you all get to enjoy a break – as Autodesk employees do during our “week of rest”... Read more →

A tool to help understand transformation matrices in AutoCAD

As promised, today’s post delivers a simple application that provides a user-interface for the command implemented in this previous post. I chose to implement the UI as a WPF user control which is then hosted by a standard AutoCAD palette. Aside from its core function – to allow composition of transformation matrices to be applied on an AutoCAD object – it demonstrates a couple of handy tips for working with Palettes: Separate the core functionality from our UI, using SendStringToExecute() to call it This will reduce the chance of issues related to Document vs. Session context, document-locking, etc. If... Read more →

Did not arrive in London

Things were going so well on this year’s DevDays tour. Then, as Jeremy reported on his blog, the best-laid plans of mice and men unravelled, thanks to the severe weather conditions that have been hitting the UK. Despite the bad news in the weather, yesterday morning, I was still reasonably (foolishly?) optimistic about my own chances of getting to the UK: British Airways had declared my flight still to be operating – mainly as it was the return flight of one of the 4 short-haul flights planned to leave Heathrow yesterday. By the time I arrived at the airport,... Read more →

A simple command to perform a matrix transformation on an AutoCAD entity using .NET

As promised in the last post and based on the overwhelming feedback in the one before that, today we’re starting a series on how to transform AutoCAD geometry. Before developing a fancy modeless GUI to make this really easy, we need a base command that can do the hard work. What’s needed from our basic command is the following: Get a single entity from the pickfirst set (which will help us when calling the command from our modeless UI) If there isn’t one selected, ask the user for it Get the property name to transform Only for writeable Point3d... Read more →

Arrived in München

I’ve arrived in Munich for our German DevDay + DevLab. There’s lots of snow, but luckily I didn’t get delayed: I was a touch paranoid after my trip to AU, and then having to fly two legs to get here. Therein lies a story: it’s not usually needed to take two planes to get from Switzerland to Munich, of course, but I had a 30-minute flight from Geneva to Zurich before connecting to a 50-minute flight form Zurich to Munich. As far as I recall this was the most cost-effective option when I booked the flight. My home is... Read more →

Enter The Matrix

One AU evening at the bar, I was chatting to a couple of developers who suggested covering some fundamental mathematics on this blog: their respective career paths had not involved any formal (or perhaps recent) studies of certain important areas of mathematics, especially related to core linear algebra concepts such as matrix multiplication. Part of me said, “what a great idea”, another part said “I wonder what resources are already out there” and the last said “oh man, I don’t remember how all that stuff actually works”. :-) Before I start dusting off some of that well-buried geometrical knowledge,... Read more →

Some content from AU 2010

As many of you may now be aware, much of the content recorded at this year’s Autodesk University is now available on the AU website. You’ll find the recording of my AU Virtual session, “Getting to Know the AutoCAD® Plug-ins of the Month”, as well as material from the two physical sessions I presented, “Point Clouds on a Shoestring” and “Integrate F# into Your C# or VB.NET Application for an 8x Performance Boost”. In fact, much to my surprise, the “Point Clouds on a Shoestring” session (which turned out to be my highest-rated session) ended up being recorded, and... Read more →

December’s Plugin of the Month live on Autodesk Labs: QR Codes for AutoCAD

As promised and reported on, and then announced by Scott on his blog, the QR Codes application for AutoCAD is now live on Autodesk Labs as December’s Plugin of the Month. You may have seen my original implementation, but it’s come a long way thanks to the efforts of Augusto Gonçalves, a member of DevTech based in São Paulo. While I had developed the original implementation to create and embed raster images using the Google Chart API, Augusto extended that implementation to create native hatches for QR Codes. And while my implementation focused on a command-line UI, Augusto implemented... Read more →

Jigging an AutoCAD polyline with arc segments using .NET

I was just easing back into post-AU work – dealing with my email backlog and thinking about possible blog posts for the week – when I received a very welcome email from Philippe Leefsma, a member of the DevTech team based in Prague. Philippe had a bit of time to spare during our annual DevDays tour and decided to polish up a sample he’d been working on for posting. It extends a post of mine from four years ago (I can’t believe it’s been that long, but anyway), which shows how to jig a polyline with keywords. Philippe adjusted... Read more →

Back from AU 2010

I was hoping to post during the week from Las Vegas, but it didn’t end up happening. My time just bled away between the various classes I recorded/ presented/co-paneled and the time spent catching up with old friends and making new ones – mainly from among the various people who took the chance to provide greatly appreciated feedback regarding this blog. All in all it was a great week – as it always is – but it wasn’t all smooth sailing: my AU Virtual session on our Plugins of the Month – which I’d struggled to get into Vegas... Read more →