Through the Interface

Loading blocked and network-hosted assemblies with .NET 4

As you’re probably mostly aware, many of our 2012 products use .NET 4 as standard. This has proven “interesting” (i.e. challenging) when it comes to loading – for example – plugin DLLs downloaded from the web, due to .NET’s updated security model. Our ADN Plugins of the Month on Autodesk Labs are a prime example: most were posted prior to AutoCAD 2012 shipping, but when downloaded locally and NETLOADed into AutoCAD 2012, very often a security error gets reported: Cannot load assembly. Error details: System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly 'file:///C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2012 – English\ADNPlugin-QRCodes.dll' or one of... Read more →

Translating tooltips in AutoCAD, Inventor and Revit using .NET

Once again, it turned out to be pretty straightforward to add Inventor support to our TransTips application. We now have a single solution which builds plugins for AutoCAD, Inventor and Revit. The plugins share a common translation and caching engine as well as a WPF graphical user interface for selecting languages. Here’s a demonstration of the various plugins in action: I’ve fixed the right-to-left issue highlighted in the video, incidentally. The next steps are to implement an in-product editing capability and then perhaps to support 3ds Max. One great aspect of this project is that I’m getting to learn... Read more →

Translating tooltips in both AutoCAD and Revit using .NET

A quick update, today. Last week Jeremy posted a migrated version of the TransTips plug-in for AutoCAD, this time working inside Revit. Thanks to the shared use of AdWindows.dll in both products, this was actually really easy. After this initial version, it made sense to refactor the code to have a core, shared file (not necessarily a separate DLL component – sharing source can give many benefits for smaller projects, such as this) used to build plugin DLLs for both AutoCAD and Revit. Here’s the result: a single solution which will build TransTips DLLs for AutoCAD and Revit (including... Read more →

AutoCAD .NET Training DevTV: downloadable session recordings

In addition to posting the transcripts, we’ve now posted recordings of the recent DevTV series on AutoCAD .NET for you to download and watch. You’ll find them on the AutoCAD .NET Developer Center, under the Samples and Documentation section (see the image on the right, if you have trouble finding them). If you’d prefer to watch them online, here are direct links to the sessions: Introduction and Sessions Overview Getting Started User Input Database Fundamentals Database Events, PaletteSet Dictionaries, Containers, Type Identification, Casting InputPoint Monitor Jigs User Interface elements We hope you’ve found these sessions useful. We’d certainly appreciate... Read more →

Live AutoCAD Customization Facecast, today!

As mentioned in this previous post, today I’m hosting a live Facecast on AutoCAD Customization. If you’re free for 30 minutes at this time, please do drop by and watch the show: Watch live streaming video from autocad at livestream.com [This viewer will show the current contents of the AutoCAD Facecast stream. Once other Facecasts have been delivered, they’ll supersede mine in this viewing window.] And I’m still open for questions posted as comments or submitted via email, of course. Speak to you later. :-) Read more →

Caching translations of AutoCAD tooltips using .NET

In this previous post we introduced a technique for automatically translating AutoCAD’s tooltips in... Read more →

AutoCAD Customization Facecast

I’ll be delivering a Facecast on AutoCAD Customization next Tuesday, July 19th 2011 at 5pm CET / 8am PST. If you’d like to attend, please RSVP via this Facebook page. The timing on the page seems to be for 3 hours, but I’ve been told the session will last around 30 minutes. I’ll embed a viewer onto the Facecast – for people to watch live and after the fact – inside a blog post on Tuesday, so you can also just come here, then. If you need some help working out the time of the session in your location,... Read more →

Automatic translation of AutoCAD tooltips using .NET

One of the great benefits I have from working in our Neuchâtel office is my proximity to a great many talented members of Autodesk’s Worldwide Localization team, who are responsible for translating most of our products into various languages. Over the last few months, I’ve been working even more closely than usual with that team, mainly looking at ways Autodesk might broaden the ability to localize our software. A couple of hot topics are of particular interest, these days, in the world of localization: machine translation and crowdsourcing. The implementation I’ll be showing over the next few posts actually... Read more →

Modifying AutoCAD tooltips using .NET

To continue on the theme established in the last post, today we’re going to go ahead and modify AutoCAD tooltips, prefixing them with a fixed string. This is the next step on the path to modifying them in a more meaningful way (to translate them into a different language, for instance). Here’s some C# code that implements a command to prefix all AutoCAD tooltips with a silly string (“Kean says this command …“): using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Windows.Controls; using System.Windows; namespace PrefixTooltips { public class Commands { List _handled = null; [CommandMethod("PREFTT")] public void... Read more →

Getting the basic content from AutoCAD tooltips using .NET

I’m working on an internal project that seems to be worth sharing externally. I’m looking at the potential for run-time modification (thinking mainly about translation) of tooltips displayed by AutoCAD. The first step towards realising this is clearly to determine when tooltips are going to be displayed and to establish the content of these tooltips. Here’s some C# code that does this (written with Visual Studio 2010, so users of prior versions may need to swap out my lambda function for a delegate or even a full event-handler function). You’ll also need to include AdWindows.dll in addition to the... Read more →

Minesweeper in AutoCAD using .NET

Today’s post contains some fun code contributed by Stephen Preston which re-creates the Minesweeper video game inside AutoCAD. Stephen tells me it needs a bit of polishing, but the game is certainly playable. I’ve reformatted some of Stephen’s code to fit this blog. The implementation comprises two main files, which you can name as you wish. I’ve used the VS 2010 convention for line-breaks (which means you don’t need an underscore). If you’re using older versions of Visual Sudio or Visual Basic Express you may need to concatenate lines or insert underscores at the end of them. Here’s the... Read more →

Recovering from Autodesk’s European Football Tournament 2011

I arrived back home on Sunday afternoon from a really fun event: Autodesk Europe’s annual 7-a-side football (i.e. soccer) tournament. This year it was held in Verona, Italy, which was a comfortable 5-6 hour drive from my home near Neuchâtel. This year I played for a team made up of employees from Autodesk’s Global Services (to which ADN belongs) and Worldwide Marketing teams (two teams ended up being combined as both were a little short on players). Here’s the pre-tournament team photo: The players (from left-to-right and back-to-front): Kean Walmsley, Jason Summerfield, Jeremy Tammik, Fenton Webb, Gary Wassell, Marat... Read more →

Transcripts for the AutoCAD .NET Training DevTVs

As requested, Wayne has kindly provided transcripts for the recently posted (and now complete) series of DevTV sessions on AutoCAD .NET development. To recap, here are the posts for the various lessons: Introduction and Sessions Overview, Getting Started User Input Database Fundamentals Database Events, PaletteSet Dictionaries, Containers, Type Identification, Casting InputPoint Monitor Jigs User Interface elements Here are the scripts that Wayne used to record the material. Wayne created them as a guide for himself (and others – should we end up translating the material), rather than being a verbatim record of what Wayne ended up saying. Please forgive... Read more →