Through the Interface

AU2012

It’s been a pretty wild few days… Saturday As I’ve tended to, in recent years (barring issues related to weather), I flew in from Geneva via Heathrow and arrived in Las Vegas on Saturday evening. The flight was full, and a good half of the people on the plane were destined for AU, it seemed: our travel system is meant to limit the number of Autodesk employees on the same flight – probably because we make too much noise when enough of us are put together (just kidding, of course – the limit is there but it’s related to... Read more →

Installing an SSD in my MacBook Pro

I arrived safely in Las Vegas for AU2012 and spent the day yesterday indulging in a little retail therapy to help get over my jetlag. I’m certainly feeling all the better for it. :-) As we’re yet to start the conference itself, I decided to focus today’s post on some general preparation I made for this year’s conference: how I upgraded my main system to get it ready – in particular – for the rigours of running various OS installations and the tools I need for my “cloud & mobile” session. A few weeks ago, I finally succumbed to... Read more →

AU 2012 Handout: Moving code to the cloud – it’s easier than you think – Part 2

After introducing the topic – as well as creating our basic, local web-service – in the last post, today we’re going to publish our MVC 4 Web API application to the cloud and see it working from a number of different client environments. Preparing to publish to Azure Now that we’re ready to publish to Azure, we need to add a deployment project to our solution. Right-click “ApollonianPackingWebApi” in the Solution Explorer and select “Add Windows Azure Cloud Service Project”. This will add a new project into our solution. We can now double-click the entry under the “Roles” folder... Read more →

AU 2012 Handout: Moving code to the cloud – it’s easier than you think – Part 1

After posting the handout for my Wednesday class, now it’s time to start the one for Tuesday's - CP1914 - Moving Code to the Cloud: It's Easier Than You Think (I have a lot else going on on Tuesday, but this is the only class on that day for which I needed to prepare material). Attendance for both classes is looking fairly good: there are currently 138 attendees registered for the Cloud session and 62 registered for the one on WinRT. Why all this talk of the cloud? The software industry is steadily adopting a model commonly referred to... Read more →

AU 2012 Handout: Developing a simple Metro-style application for Windows 8 – Part 2

This post contains the second part of the handout for my Windows 8-related session at AU 2012 (here’s the first part). Here’s the accompanying source project for the MetroCAD application, which has now been upgraded to work on the shipping version of Windows 8. What can be done with AutoCAD? Something that’s being promoted by Microsoft to developers of “heavyweight” desktop apps is the idea of a companion app. These are essentially Windows Store apps that complement desktop apps such as AutoCAD. We’re going to see one such companion app in this session: an app called MetroCAD that is... Read more →

AU 2012 Handout: Developing a simple Metro-style application for Windows 8 – Part 1

I finally managed to wrap-up my AU material over the weekend. Here’s the first part of the handout for my Windows 8-related session (if you log in with your AU account, you’ll be able to access the accompanying presentation and sample project). This is an “intermediate” class (rather than “advanced”), so at times it may seem fairly high-level. That said, if anyone sees issues with the material – especially important topics that have been glossed over – please do let me know: I’d be happy to make corrections (especially in advance of the class being delivered :-). Introduction Windows... Read more →

A tale of two concerts

I was going to start posting my AU handouts today, but I’ll leave that until tomorrow (an exceptional four-post week for me!). I decided to fulfill a casual request from an old Autodesk buddy of mine, Thomas Schwaiger, although I thought I’d broaden the topic just slightly. :-) I’ve been to see a couple of my favourite rock bands as they’ve passed through Switzerland, this year. The first was a bit opportunistic: some friends had tickets to the original Radiohead concert date in Switzerland on their recent tour to be held at an incredible venue, a disused quarry in... Read more →

Last chance to sign up for the APPHACK!

A quick reminder about the deadline for the AU APPHACK that I mentioned in this previous post is today, November 14th. There are some great prizes on offer, and you may not even have to write a single line of code between now and AU to win a prize (if you have a cool project that works with AutoCAD 2013 currently in development – ideally with some kind of cloud integration to keep within the theme of the contest – this is a fantastic opportunity to get both a reward and some great visibility). You do need to be... Read more →

Finding primes in AutoCAD using .NET

After introducing the work down by Carlos Paris on using AutoCAD to hunt prime numbers, we then looked at some DesignScript code that essentially recreates the core geometry Carlos used to visualize prime numbers. In this post, we’ll create some .NET code that iterates through the visualization, gathering primes and tagging them with rays to make them easily locatable. Now use AutoCAD as a graphical hash-table in this way is not the way you’re going to discover a billion-digit prime number, but the approach is interesting because it adds useful information to the primes visualization and also shows some... Read more →

Using DesignScript to visualize prime numbers in AutoCAD

In the last post we looked at some amazing visualizations of prime numbers created by Carlos Paris. I also mentioned I’d try my hand at replicating the basic visualization using DesignScript: it’s a good fit for solving this kind of problem (we want to create lots of repeated geometry based on the results of mathematical expressions). Incidentally, some readers of this blog have expressed an interest in learning more about DesignScript. I’ve roped in Robert Aish and Luke Church to share some of their insights into the design of – and uses for – the language, and so they’ll... Read more →

Using AutoCAD to hunt prime numbers

As Shaan reported over on his blog, AutoCAD gets used in some very surprising ways. This “Hack A Day” article highlights the achievements of Carlos Paris, an HVAC engineer and AutoCAD user who found a novel way to visualize and understand prime numbers. Carlos originally believed he’d found an elusive proof for the twin prime conjecture, and while it turned out not to be the case he certainly found a novel way of representing a Sieve of Eratosthenes graphically. I really enjoyed watching Carlos’s videos on YouTube, and thought I’d check in with him by email to see how... Read more →

Creating the smallest possible rectangle around 2D AutoCAD geometry using .NET

There was a follow-up comment on this previous post, requesting that it also create a rectangular boundary around selected geometry. This is a much simpler problem to solve that dealing with a minimum enclosing circle, so I was happy enough to oblige. :-) Rather than duplicate code from the previous implement, I went ahead and generalised it to contain a core set of functions that get called from different commands: MEC in the existing case where circular boundaries are required and MER for the new case of a rectangular polyline boundary. I’ve also adjusted the prompts and code to... Read more →

Updated AutoCAD integration samples for Kinect SDK v1.6

As part of my ongoing procrastination around my AU material development – despite which I’m managing to make some progress… my WinRT stuff is mostly done, now – I went ahead and updated my Kinect samples to use v1.6 of the SDK. The version which finally works from a Windows session inside a Parallels VM on my Mac. Yay! Here is the updated sample project, which includes the face-tracking capabilities shown in this previous post and therefore also requires the Kinect Developer Toolkit. It wasn’t really much effort to port: a couple of methods that map depth and colour... Read more →