Through the Interface

Call for proposals: Autodesk University 2013

I arrived back safely in Switzerland on Saturday night. It was a pretty good trip to the Bay Area, this time: most surprisingly this is the first time ever I’ve managed to sleep through until 6am (or thereabouts) on every single day of a trip to California. But then I – like many people – do find going west to be easier than going east, jetlag-wise. I certainly found that I couldn’t get back to sleep when I woke up at home on Sunday morning at 3am, which made for a very long day (especially as we participated in... Read more →

Under the hood: AutoCAD’s JavaScript API

Being here in San Rafael, it seemed like a good opportunity to put pen to paper on the internals of the JavaScript API introduced in AutoCAD 2014. It’s a topic I’ve been meaning to get to for some time, and sitting in the cube next to Albert Szilvasy helps me get information straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were (no offence, Albert ;-). For those of you who don’t know Albert, he’s someone who has had an incredible impact on the AutoCAD product, over the years, particularly from a platform perspective. Albert was the person to architect and... Read more →

Stripping formatting from AutoCAD tables pasted from Excel using .NET

I’m back in San Rafael after a tiring – but very rewarding – two days down in Santa Cruz. I’ve decided to rattle out a quick post – inspired by this recent comment – before heading out for dinner, so I hope my brain isn’t playing tricks on me when it says the code’s good enough to post. Please do let me know if you see anything wrong with it. Here’s the question: Kean, I am wondering how to do this on table objects. When importing a table from excel as pasting special ACAD objects, you can reset the... Read more →

Santa Cruz

My flight out of Zurich was delayed slightly – for snow, of all things! – but the trip across to San Francisco was otherwise smooth enough. After spending a fun Saturday night and Sunday in the city – catching up with old friends – it was nice to head back up to San Rafael for the evening. I spent most of the day today (it’s still Monday, here) in our San Rafael office before we hit the road south to Santa Cruz, where I’ll be attending an offsite meeting for the next few days. I chose to sit in... Read more →

Going West

I’m hopping on a plane tomorrow to head across to the Bay Area for a week – I have some internal meetings to attend there. This is the first time I’m flying direct from Switzerland – Swiss now run a direct flight from Zurich to SFO – so that’s something, I suppose. I actually have a few more long-haul trips planned over the coming months, but hopefully I’ll manage to keep on posting regularly (I’ve become quite spoiled with having so much less travel since I changing jobs at the beginning of last year). It’s typical that the travel... Read more →

Show me the money!

Or otherwise named “Creating an AutoCAD jig to dynamically display a guilloché pattern using F#”. But then why pass up the chance for a Jerry Maguire reference? :-) Anyway, to continue on from last week’s post, Doug – who had presented the original challenge – went on to suggest that I give it the same treatment as Spiro. Basically to implement a jig to display the guilloche pattern dynamically as you input the various options. I understand the difficulty in understanding the nature of the geometry being created in the previous version… the fact that I’d named the original... Read more →

40 and a day

So that’s it, then. As mentioned some months ago, I’ve now successfully transitioned from thirtysomething to fortysomething. To celebrate the day itself, I shared a cheese fondue with family and a few friends. What was a bit different about this meal is that we had it in the back of a specially adapted horse-drawn carriage that took us along the banks of the river Thielle. A very nice experience to share. It was beautiful weather, the Alps were visible in the distance and there was still snow on top of the Chasseral (off to the left, in the below... Read more →

Printing your own money with AutoCAD

Here’s a fun one to finish up the week. And no, it isn’t a belated April Fool’s gag. ;-) I should probably say right away that you won’t be printing money after reading this blog post, but you might know more about some of the security measures used by those who do. A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from Doug Bell at PaperMoneyWorld.net: I have tried your Spiro for AutoCAD and I enjoy it very much. I would like to challenge you to another function I would like to see that is related to the spirograph.... Read more →

Measuring time elapsed during custom AutoCAD command execution using .NET

As a follow-on from the last post, in today’s we’re going to look at a crude approach for collecting execution information about functions of your choosing from a .NET app inside AutoCAD. We’re going to extend the implementation shown last time to record the time taken for the various “instrumented” commands to execute and make it easy to copy and paste this “performance” data into a tool such as Excel. We could also dump out a file directly that can be imported into Excel, but this way is simpler and only slightly more manual. It’s important to note the... Read more →

Querying AutoCAD objects of a particular type using .NET

Late last week I received an interesting email from Bruno Saboia, who’s been experiencing some performance issues with code he’d written to return all the objects of a particular type – in his case, Lines – from the model-space of the active drawing. We exchanged a few emails on the topic, and Bruno kindly allowed me to post his code and my suggestions for changes. In today’s post, we’re going to look at both the code and my suggestions, while in the next post (in this mini-series, at least) we’ll look at a simple execution framework that can allows... Read more →

More on Morgan

For those of you who may have missed it, I really like the Morgan Motor Company, and in particular the latest incarnation of their iconic Morgan 3 Wheeler. Which is why I was very happy to see it featured during Autodesk’s recent 2014 launch event: What’s fascinating to me is the use of a high-tech design process to create something – which is then built by hand, with a wooden chassis – that has such a low-tech, no frills driving experience: I’m also a big reader of science fiction, so the idea of donning steampunk aviator goggles and leather... Read more →

A Fab Lab opens its doors in Neuchâtel

The last few Wednesday mornings I’ve swung by Place de la Gare to visit the recently-opened Fab Lab in Neuchâtel. Here’s a quick video description of what Fab Labs are about (and here’s their charter): I was new to the concept of Fab Labs, but was excited to find out one now exists here (thankfully my wife listens to local radio! ;-). I’ve been jealous of my US-based Autodesk colleagues who have access to the excellent TechShop (Autodesk employees get free membership, which is a pretty fantastic benefit if you have one nearby). Having a Fab Lab nearby at... Read more →

Taking reality capture to the next level: 3D scentsing

I’m excited to announce some revolutionary new technology our "reality capture” team is working on at Autodesk. By now many people will be familiar with the Rip-Mod-Fab workflow (the 3D equivalent of Rip-Mix-Burn for music). The problem with this is that there’s something fundamental missing from the equation: that most aromatic of dimensions, the world of odours. How many of you have used 123D Catch to copy a real-world object, printing it using with MakerBot, only to find something missing? That once you’ve got over the utter coolness of being able to print something in three dimensions, you’re somehow... Read more →