Through the Interface

Moving to the Cloud

This is a topic I’ve been meaning to cover for some time. It concerns a transition we’re seeing overall in the software industry, and is certainly one that the ADN team broached in depth during the last two DevDays tours. I don’t think anyone is in real doubt, at this stage, that software is increasingly being delivered “as a service”, rather than via locally-installed desktop applications. Some readers may understandably be skeptical about the near-term likelihood of powerful design tools working in the cloud… I personally believe it’s an inevitable shift (whether we’re talking about a timeframe of 2... Read more →

Implementing contracts in the AutoCAD MRU browser using WinRT

As part of my quest to understand WinRT more completely, I had a few goals for the MetroCAD application we saw in this previous post. Firstly, I wanted to add some contract support to the application, allowing it to participate in operations that Windows 8 has standardised across Metro-style applications. The main contracts I wanted to support were for search, sharing and settings. Secondly, I wanted to be able to launch AutoCAD – or another DWG editor – from within our Metro-style application. The three contracts I wanted to support are all accessible via the “Charms” menu in Windows... Read more →

The new developer experience in Visual Studio 11

I'm sure several of you have formed opinions on the new look & feel of the Visual Studio 11 Beta, whether you've installed it on your existing OS or have tried it on one of the preview versions of Windows 8 (or perhaps you’ve just seen screenshots on the web). I've been using it now for a couple of weeks – on and off, admittedly – and have mixed feelings about the new monochrome styling. A lot of people have stronger views (which is basically a polite way of saying it’s fairly universally hated, judging from the feedback). I... Read more →

Commands that “work” in the AutoCAD 2013 Core Console

After seeing the feedback regarding this interesting feature in AutoCAD 2013, I decided to do a little detective work to establish which commands could be called from inside the AutoCAD 2013 Core Console. I hope this proves to be of use to at least some of the many people I expect to take advantage of this tool. Before I go into the details on generating the list – and then look at the list itself – it’s worth mentioning some additional background regarding this feature. I certainly see the Core Console as being extremely useful to many people, but... Read more →

Updated AutoCAD + Kinect for Windows samples

Thanks to some recent coverage on a Channel 9 blog (which I consider a great honour – I’ve been a huge fan of Channel 9 since its inception :-), I decided to get around to posting an update to the AutoCAD + Kinect samples I demonstrated at AU 2011. While attending the recent hackathon, I spent a fair amount of time porting my AutoCAD-Kinect integration samples from the Beta 2 of the Microsoft Kinect SDK (for the Kinect for Xbox 360 sensor) to the released SDK for the Kinect for Windows. It was pretty impressive just how many of... Read more →

A simple MRU browser for AutoCAD data using WinRT

As promised in my last post, I spent some time hacking together a basic application to get a feel for what it’s like to develop inside the WinRT sandbox for Windows 8. If you’re interested in the source code, here it is. Be warned: the code is really just to prove a concept – there’s a lot therein I’d consider sub-optimal for a production application. If you’re more interested in seeing the application in action, but haven’t yet installed the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, then here’s a quick screencast I recorded: A few comments on the experience of developing... Read more →

Extracting MRU information from AutoCAD using .NET

Inspired by the Windows 8 conference I attended on Monday, I’ve decided to build my first Metro-style application which scrolls through AutoCAD’s Most-Recently-Used (MRU) drawing list. I now have a barebones installation of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview + VS11 Beta inside a Parallels VM on my Mac, but rather than installing AutoCAD into that, I decided to write a simple exporter on my existing Windows 7 machine (which now has AutoCAD 2013 installed) to generate the data for my Metro-style application. Let’s start by looking at what file-oriented MRU data AutoCAD stores, and where. At the end of... Read more →

Attended the Windows 8 TechConference

I’ve just arrived home from a long day (mainly because of the 4-hour round-trip rail travel) at the Windows TechConference in Baden, Switzerland, focused on Windows 8. It was a pretty interesting day – thankfully, as I’m still a bit jetlagged from my trip to California, and I didn’t want to doze off in the lecture theatre. And yes, I’ve certainly dozed during a few lectures in my time, but not since leaving University. The main developer-oriented session I attended – which covered writing a WinRT application to pull down Teletext into a XAML + C# application, which was... Read more →

Getting the list of hatch patterns available in the current AutoCAD drawing using .NET

This post was inspired by an email I saw from Philippe Leefsma, from DevTech EMEA, which made use of the Autodesk.AutoCAD.Windows.Data namespace – something I didn’t even know existed. The specific example Philippe showed was how to access the list of hatch patterns available in the current drawing without iterating through the relevant dictionary in the named objects dictionary. Here’s Philippe’s C# code: using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Windows.Data; public class DataStuff { [CommandMethod("HPS")] static public void GetHatchPatterns() { Editor ed = Application.DocumentManager.MdiActiveDocument.Editor; foreach ( string str in HatchPatterns.Instance.AllPatterns) ed.WriteMessage("\n" + str); } } When we run... Read more →

More API features in AutoCAD 2013

Following on from our look at the Core Console, Dynamic .NET and .NET migration for AutoCAD 2013, today we’re going to look briefly at the remaining API features in the AutoCAD 2013 release. Model Documentation The model documentation feature was introduced in AutoCAD 2012 – simplifying creation of 2D sections and details of 3D drawing content – and this initial API provides (primarily read-only) access to this information. It comprises the following classes SectionSymbol SectionViewstyle ViewBorder ViewRepBlockReference DetailViewStyle DetailSymbol The writeable aspects of the API are mostly related to the “style” objects – these can be created and edited... Read more →

In the Bay Area

After my struggles to get here, I’ve had a fun (working) weekend in the Bay Area. We held our first internal Hackathon event, where members of the AutoCAD Engineering organisation sat in a room and developed applications that work with AutoCAD. Food and drink was provided throughout the 4-day event – reducing the need for people to leave the room – and someone even brought a sleeping bag along and camped out in the lobby for Saturday night. The final submissions deadline is looming, in a few short hours, and then tomorrow there’ll be a series of demonstrations, showing... Read more →

Migrating .NET applications to work with AutoCAD 2013

I’m on my way to San Francisco for some internal meetings (including a Hackathon, over the weekend, which should be fun), but have unfortunately been held up at Heathrow by fog (it delayed my inbound flight, along with many others’, but somehow didn’t stop my outbound flight from leaving, which always seems to be the case… I then had to queue for 2.5 hours to get a new flight, the only highlight of which was standing behind members of the junior Kuwaiti ice hockey team [at least that’s what they said they were – they may have been pulling... Read more →