Through the Interface

Drawing transient graphics appropriately in AutoCAD within multiple paperspace viewports using .NET

We’ve been looking a lot at transient graphics, recently. The standard approach we’ve been using to displaying graphics in all viewports has been to pass in an empty IntegerCollection into the various transient graphics-related methods, rather than listing the viewports specifically in which we want to display the graphics. Thorsten Meinecke made the very valid point that this doesn’t always work as you’d like, particularly when you have multiple floating paperspace viewport. Now I fully admit I’m not a big user of viewports, as far as it goes, so I sometimes forget to cater for scenarios that are probably... Read more →

Displaying transient AutoCAD points that respect PDMODE using .NET

Since starting to use the transient graphics API in AutoCAD 2009, I’ve believed that any DBPoints you display would not respect PDMODE (the AutoCAD system variable allowing the user to control how points are displayed). A recent internal discussion was on this very subject, and one of our engineering team, Longchao Jiang, interjected with a comment explaining that only points on the DEFPOINTS layer get displayed without PDMODE being applied. This was quite a revelation for me: DBPoints apparently get created on DEFPOINTS by default and simply changing them to layer 0 (say) would cause them to respect PDMODE... Read more →

Generating a mesh for a 3D solid using AutoCAD’s Brep API from .NET

Thanks for Balaji Ramamoorthy – who recently joined our team in India – and Adam Nagy for helping generate the code for this post. There are lots of reasons people might want to tessellate a 3D solid in AutoCAD to generate a mesh. The code in today’s post uses the Boundary Representation (Brep) API in AutoCAD to do just that, generating a set of 3D faces. A few points about the implementation: I’ve only made a small number of settings to control the mesh generation: more are available for you to experiment with. It should be simple enough to... Read more →

New APIs in AutoCAD 2012

As you may have seen – including over at Shaan’s blog – the 2012 family of our products has now been announced. Stephen Preston, our DevTech Americas Manager, has recorded a DevTV session on the new APIs in AutoCAD 2012. This material was presented during our recent Developer Days tour, attended by ADN members around the world. AutoCAD 2012 – New APIs View Download (17.2MB) Samples (133KB) Highlights & topics covered: Migration steps New APIs Associative Array API Multi-mode Grip API ResetTimes VisibilityOverrule BlockTableRecord.SetIsFromOverlayReference acdbConvertAcDbCurveToGelibCurve acdbConvertGelibCurveToAcDbCurve acdbAssignGelibCurveToAcDbCurve Autoloader Simplified plugin deployment AutoCAD for Mac I’ll definitely be following up... Read more →

Finally working with Visual Studio 2010

Despite having worked for some time with a number of language features previewed for VS2008 and properly released in VS2010 (F# being a prime example), I’ve finally gotten around to installing VS2010 as my main .NET code development environment. To make sure I could get code across properly into my blog, I was able to get my favourite source code copying tool, CopySourceAsHTML, working in Visual Studio 2010. And thanks to tips from Ewen Wallace and Scott McFarlane, I upgraded my use of RockScroll to switch across to AllMargins (which includes the particularly handy OverviewMargin tool, as seen at... Read more →

TED, Education and Matrix Mathematics

I talked briefly about TED, a few weeks ago. A number of Autodesk employees attend this event, including members of our senior staff. During a recent All Hands session, Amar Hanspal – who heads up our Platforms Solutions and Emerging Business division, which includes both Autodesk Labs and AutoCAD Engineering (among other teams) – reported on his experience at TED 2011, and talked about a couple of extremely inspiring presentations. One of them, by Salman Khan, discussed a non-profit organisation he had set up to help educate people on mathematics (and now other subjects). Thought-provoking stuff: it certainly has... Read more →

Adding ortho support to the transient graphics AutoCAD MOVE using .NET

As promised, I ended up burning more that a few hours this evening (after being up very early for meetings this morning), to add orthographic drawing support to the code shown in the last post. It took quite some work, switching between UCS and WCS until my head was more than a little twisted. This thread on The Swamp provided well-needed inspiration, too (thanks, MickD :-). Here’s the C# code – I would have highlighted the modified lines in red, but the code is too wide to add 3-digit lines without it looking ugly, and – besides – I... Read more →

Using transient graphics to simulate AutoCAD’s MOVE command using .NET

A big thanks to Norman Yuan for the technique shown in this post. I stumbled across Norman’s post on this topic, and decided to take his code and rework it for posting here, with Norman’s permission, of course. Very interesting stuff! :-) First things first: you probably don’t have a burning need to reinvent either the wheel or AutoCAD’s MOVE command. That said, this is a technique that may be of interest to many of you, especially if – for whatever reason – you’re looking for an alternative to using a jig. The technique Norman has shown uses a... Read more →

Handling DPI scaling in your .NET application’s forms

This topic isn’t at all specific to AutoCAD – in fact it was encountered by Adam Nagy with the recent Plugin of the Month he developed for Revit – but it seemed something people might hit. Thanks to Adam for proposing this topic and providing the information to share with everyone. :-) In recent versions of Windows – at least with Vista and Windows 7, but perhaps versions before that – it’s possible for the user to adjust DPI Scaling options on their system as part of the usability/accessibility options. This can cause issues with how your dialogs are... Read more →

Making AutoCAD less noisy when debugging

Thanks for George Varghese and Albert Szilvasy from the AutoCAD Engineering team for this helpful tip (culled from an internal email discussion). If you’ve ever wondered how to reduce the noise AutoCAD makes in Visual Studio’s output window while debugging – at least since AutoCAD 2009, when we integrated WPF for user-interface components such as the ribbon – then this post will be of help to you. Here’s the window we’re talking about, which fills with messages from the application being debugged (in this case AutoCAD, whose acad.exe needs to be listed in the Debug properties under Start external... Read more →

Instant 3D model capture

While in our San Francisco office, the week before last, I bumped into Brian Mathews and team as they were making their final preparations for the TED 2011 conference. I don’t know how many of you know about TED: it's an amazing conference - and information resource - that I'm proud to say that Autodesk sponsors. It’s a dream of mine to attend this event in person (maybe one day I’ll get the chance) but at least the sessions are posted online for everyone to enjoy. The Autodesk Labs team has put together some really fun technology – as... Read more →

Back from the US

It was a productive 10-day trip to the US: 7 performance reviews (6 delivered, 1 received), many presentations (3 delivered by me, one of which was Pecha Kucha-style) and probably a dozen or so 1-on-1 meetings with team members, as well as going through the Birkman Method with my direct team and peers. Altogether a great week, just a little grueling. The schools are out, this week – as the canton of Neuchâtel celebrates its founding on March 1st, every year – so I’m going to spend the next day or so mostly offline with my family, and will... Read more →