Through the Interface

Public symbols for AutoCAD 2012

Better information when debugging .NET and ObjectARX applications has been a long-standing request from our developer community. I’m happy to say that this week we’ve posted a set of public debugging symbols (in the form of stripped PDB files) to our new corporate symbol server, http://symbols.autodesk.com/symbols. For now' we’ve posted the 32- and 64-bit PDBs for AutoCAD 2012, and will continue to update them with symbols for our public releases. Before going too much further, it’s worth looking at some background information on debugging symbols and how to make use of a symbol server from Visual Studio. Now let’s... Read more →

Finally working with the Async CTP for VS 2010

I’ve been planning to look at it for ages – and have certainly mentioned it before – but other things have kept on cropping up. Well last Thursday, on my train trip back from Wallisellen (the home of Microsoft Switzerland), I finally managed to take the plunge and start working with the Async CTP for Visual Studio 2010. I’d been in Wallisellen to attend an MSDN TechTalk presentation by Stephen Toub, Principal Architect on Microsoft’s Parallel Computing Platform team. I’ve followed Stephen via his blog – and the Parallel Programming with .NET blog – for a long time, and... Read more →

AutoCAD .NET Training DevTV Session 8: User Interface elements

Another Friday, another installment of Wayne Brill’s AutoCAD .NET training DevTV series (to complement those sessions from previous weeks). Today’s session is focused user-interface elements such as the .NET attributes for exposing commands and optimizing loading, adding your own tab to the options dialog and implementing drag & drop. This series of DevTV sessions is a companion for the new AutoCAD .NET training material available from the AutoCAD .NET Developer Center. Enjoy! :-) Read more →

ADN DevCast Episode 7 – Creating an installer to deploy apps via the Autoloader

As a follow-up to their session on the Autoloader, AutoCAD 2012’s simplified deployment mechanism, Stephen and Fenton have recorded another DevCast focused on creating an installer to deploy apps via the Autoloader. These two DevCasts are likely to be of relevance to anyone wishing to deploy their plugin via the “Apps” tab in Autodesk Exchange. There’s also a new Developer Center focused on this very task, providing the guidelines and requirements for publishing apps along with a couple of helpful DevTV sessions to get you started. Read more →

5 years of Through the Interface

Through the Interface turned 5 yesterday (I only realised late last night, as it was a Sunday). To celebrate this milestone, I’ve had a look in Google Analytics to determine the 20 most-visited posts over the last five years (or at least since records began – we’ve been collecting data with our current GA tracking since mid-2008). This only measures posts that have been found directly from an external link or a web search – it doesn’t track popularity of posts read via the main page, for instance. AutoCAD 2008 – 64-bit application migration Getting started with AutoCAD and... Read more →

AutoCAD .NET Training DevTV Session 7: Jigs

Another Friday, another installment of Wayne Brill’s AutoCAD .NET training DevTV series (to complement those from previous weeks). Today’s session is focused on the ever-important feature when implementing user-input in your custom commands: Jigs. This series of DevTV sessions is a companion for the new AutoCAD .NET training material available from the AutoCAD .NET Developer Center. Enjoy! :-) Read more →

A guide-line for Visual Studio

And yes, I do mean that literally. :-) Since starting this blog, 5 years ago – and even more in the last 2 years, since starting to develop and edit our Plugins of the Month for Autodesk Labs – I’ve been checking every line of code I’ve written to make sure it doesn’t exceed 70 characters in length (the magic number for fitting my blog’s width). It’s become close to automatic – in the sense I rarely write lines that exceed this length and therefore need adjusting – but the process I use is still quite manual: I check... Read more →

Companion apps now available in AutoCAD 2012

Today is a holiday, here in Switzerland, and I suffered a PC failure late last week, so I'm writing this without access to my usual system resources (AutoCAD 2012 and Visual Studio 2010, for instance). Despite these minor complications, I did want to let you know about this very important announcement. The introduction of the companion apps via the Autodesk Exchange Apps tab inside AutoCAD 2012 - a mechanism introducing AutoCAD's extensive customer base to the value of applications from AutoCAD developers - could well turn out to be a watershed moment in the history of AutoCAD, comparable to... Read more →

AutoCAD .NET Training DevTV Session 6: InputPoint Monitor

Another Friday, another installment of Wayne Brill’s AutoCAD .NET training DevTV series (to complement those from previous weeks). Today’s session is focused on the very useful InputPoint Monitor capability. This series of DevTV sessions is a companion for the new AutoCAD .NET training material available from the AutoCAD .NET Developer Center. Enjoy! :-) Read more →

In China

I’m currently in Shanghai for an internal technical conference, which I’m really looking forward to. There are loads of very interesting, deeply technical sessions on the 2-day agenda. I travelled via Beijing, to spend some time with the DevTech China team, yesterday, and will fly back there on Thursday evening to spend time with them on Friday, too. (Monday was a holiday in China – the Dragon Boat Festival – which meant I have to do a lot of flying around to get a couple of days this week in both places.) There seems to be a storm cloud... Read more →

API wishlist surveys – reminder

Just a gentle reminder – for those of you who have not yet had the chance to complete them – that this year’s API wishlist surveys are still open: AutoCAD® AutoCAD® Civil 3D® Revit® Autodesk Inventor® Autodesk Navisworks® To make sure we get as many responses as possible, we’ve extended the deadline for these surveys to June 17th, 2011. In addition to these, we’ve also just published API wishlist surveys for two of our Media & Entertainment products: Autodesk 3ds Studio Max® Autodesk Maya® These two surveys will be open until July 3rd, 2011. We greatly appreciate you taking... Read more →

AutoCAD .NET Training DevTV Session 5: Dictionaries, Containers, Type Identification, Casting

This post was queued up for Friday, but a technical issue (i.e. probably user error) prevented it from going out. So here we are on Sunday, instead, for another installment of Wayne Brill’s AutoCAD .NET training DevTV series (to complement those from previous weeks). Today’s session is focused on working with dictionaries and other types of container, as well as using runtime type identification and casting. This series of DevTV sessions is a companion for the new AutoCAD .NET training material available from the AutoCAD .NET Developer Center. Enjoy! :-) Read more →

Photo Scene Editor for Project Photofly 2.0

I’ve been really excited about this release, ever since I saw the technology in action at last year’s AU. The first release of the technology was interesting, but this version really takes things to a new level: you can generate a fully textured mesh from a set of photographs. A lot of work has clearly been done on the technology to address scalability issues: I have a set of close to 500 images of a local monument, which previously was not handled by the Photofly service (for which the Photo Scene Editor is the main client application). Now, though,... Read more →