Through the Interface

Free online AutoCAD .NET training starting September 8th

Starting next week – and for 8 weeks – Wayne Brill, from DevTech Americas, will be delivering free online AutoCAD .NET training. To register – yes, for free – go to our API Training page and select “Schedule”, then scroll down to “AutoCAD .NET”, “English”, “Webcast”, “Sep 08 2011” and click “Register” at the far right of the item. This training is a live-delivered version of Wayne’s excellent series of DevTV sessions posted previously (with transcripts). This is likely to appeal to those of you who like knowing there’s a warm body at the other end of their webcast... Read more →

Increasing the size of AutoCAD’s command line history

Ever been frustrated when scrolling up in the AutoCAD text window, only to find information from earlier in that session had disappeared? I find this when listing AutoCAD commands and system variables, in particular. The standard command-line history is 400 lines, as far as I can tell, but the good news is that there’s a Registry setting allowing you to increase this amount. [Thanks to various people in AutoCAD Engineering for tracking down this information (including Asheem Mamoowala, Karen Mason and Randy Kintzley).] In AutoCAD R14, we had a Registry setting in the current profile exposed via an option... Read more →

A simplified .NET API for accessing AutoCAD parameters and constraints

In the 2010 release, we introduced 2D geometric constraints to AutoCAD. The feature was implemented using AutoCAD’s low-level – and very powerful – Associative Framework, which has subsequently been used to implement features such as parametric surfaces in AutoCAD 2011 (more information on that here). Our initial API implementation for creating and accessing geometric constraints (which you can find out more about via the DevTV session linked to from this previous post) in many ways reflects the low-level nature of the underlying framework: it was unfortunately just a bit too complicated for most mortals to get to grips with.... Read more →

Taking a REST

Actually, I wish that were true. I’m planning on taking some time off in October, but that seems a long way off, at this stage. What I’ve actually been doing is working with some REST-based APIs: firstly, I’ve been finishing up work on September’s Plugin of the Month, TransTips for AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor, & 3ds Max (to be posted on Autodesk Labs in the next few days). TransTips makes use of the REST API for Bing Translator, to automatically translate tooltips in various products. Secondly, perhaps more excitingly, I’ve been coding against a possible future web service API for... Read more →

Debugging AutoCAD .NET projects using Express Editions

Visual C# Express and Visual Basic Express can be used successfully to build .NET applications for AutoCAD: in fact many developers use these tools to do so. One long-standing issue with using these tools with AutoCAD relates to debugging: the ability to debug using an external application is not directly exposed via the user interface Visual C#/Basic Express, which – as AutoCAD implements a plug-in hosting framework for .NET Class Libraries (or DLLs) – makes life complicated. The workaround for addressing this issue has been documented in this previous post and also on the ADN web-site, but thankfully this... Read more →

Preview of the AU 2011 class catalog

The class catalog for Autodesk University 2011 is now available to preview in advance of the conference registration opening up on August 30th. Here are the sessions I’m either presenting or hosting: CP3840 Integrating Microsoft® Kinect™ with AutoCAD® Lecture Nov 30, 3:15pm CP4459-U AutoCAD® .NET Development: Tools and Best Practices Unconf-erence Dec 1, 1:15pm I’m also honoured to be co-presenting the following session with the famous (and famously lowercase) dave espinosa-aguilar: CP4717 Unlimited AutoCAD® Scripting for Everyone Lecture Nov 29, 5:00pm And I’m part of the panel for the following sessions: CP2149 AutoCAD® APIs: Meet the Experts Stephen Preston... Read more →

Preventing AutoCAD objects from being selected using .NET

In the last post, we looked at how to stop entities from being highlighted during selection. This post looks at how to stop entities from being selected at all. Thanks again to Balaji Ramamoorthy for providing the underlying technique shown in today’s code. The basic scenario we’re using is similar to the last post – we maintain a list of DXF names for the classes we want to stop from being selected – but it could easily be adapted to using different criteria for removing objects from the selection: an example being the use of a similar (although admittedly... Read more →

Preventing AutoCAD objects from being highlighted using .NET

Thanks to Balaji Ramamoorthy, from DevTech India, for the basis of this post (some code he provided in a recent reply to an ADN member). The original question came from someone who wanted to stop text objects from being highlighted when selected. I’ve extended the mechanism to make it a little more flexible: it now maintains a list of object types (their DXF names) of objects that should not be highlighted, when selected. Balaji implemented a HighlightOverrule to control the highlighting. This doesn’t stop the objects from actually being selected, however: in the next post I’ll add some additional... Read more →

The “My First Plug-In” series

A few years ago I mentioned that my team was looking into learning paths for novice programmers. This effort has led to the “My First Plug-In” series, of which we now have two guides ready: My First Revit Plug-In My First Inventor Plug-In This series is really intended for power-users of Autodesk software who want to take their use of our products to the next level, but need some targeted help on the programming side of things. We currently have guides for Maya and AutoCAD in the works. While many of this blog’s readership won’t need this kind of... Read more →

Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 – Part 2

After creating our basic LightSwitch project in the last post, today we’re going to add some real functionality. To get warmed up, let’s take a look at some contents of the project we created last time. At the top level, we see there’s a new project type, along with some intriguing files: Drilling down a level further, we see a number of sub-projects (Client, Server, Common) contain C# files: None of this should need to be edited manually, of course. Before adding some real capability to our app, let’s take a quick look at the data-type imported when we... Read more →

Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 – Part 1

Just released: a streamlined version of Visual Studio focused on developing data-centric business applications. Visual Studio LightSwitch is basically a set of templates/Wizards and runtime components that help you build and deploy applications for creating, editing and querying business data. The tool either installs on top of VS2010 or presumably installs its own Visual Studio shell, if you don’t already have it installed (I do, although I’m guessing the target audience for this tool generally would not). From a runtime perspective, LightSwitch relies heavily on Silverlight, which it uses to provide a rich UI based on your data model... Read more →

Some fun with favicons and IE9/Win7 integration

Here’s something that’s a little off-topic – relative to my other posts – but potentially of interest to fellow bloggers, people who have their own websites and even readers who’re using Internet Explorer 9 and Windows 7. Since attending the Microsoft TechDays 11 event in Geneva, back in April, I’ve been meaning to fool around with enabling this site for pinning to the Windows 7 taskbar, with some special customizations for IE9. And now that I actually have a Windows 7 installation (albeit inside Parallels on my Mac), I’ve been able to do just that. At the root of... Read more →

Translating tooltips in AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit and 3ds Max using .NET

After adding Revit and then Inventor support to the original AutoCAD application, it made sense to go ahead and include support for 3ds Max. Here’s a solution supporting these four products (and their verticals). And I can now confirm that a version of this application will be September’s Plugin of the Month on Autodesk Labs. You may have noticed a lot of UI consistency introduced across these Autodesk products, in recent years, mainly due to a coordinated push from our product teams for a more consistent user experience. An internal acronym was used for the project driving consistency across... Read more →

Dynamic use of P/Invoke on 32- and 64-bit systems

I’m now back from a nice, long weekend celebrating the Swiss National Day (August 1st) and our 10th wedding anniversary (which isn’t until November, but who wants to hold a party then? ;-). So, getting back into the saddle, here’s a question that came in recently by email: I'm using P/Invoke to call a function which is different on x86 and x64. How to code such entry point addresses dynamically, so one does not have to compile two separate versions, one for x86, and one for x64? While the answer can be found a previous post, it seemed worth... Read more →