Through the Interface

AutoCAD 2015: calling commands

photo credit: Marcin Wichary via photopin cc As mentioned in the last post, fibers are now inactive in AutoCAD 2015 (the code paths are still there, largely for testing purposes, but should not need to be enabled for typical usage of the product). Fibers were a technology that Microsoft introduced way back when to help single document (and typically single-threaded) applications adapt more easily to the brave new world of MDI. At least that’s my recollection and understanding. They were basically a mechanism by which applications such as AutoCAD could manage their per-document state, making the relevant data current... Read more →

AutoCAD 2015 for developers

I've just arrived home from a 10-day trip to the Bay Area. It was a really interesting visit – as usual – but I'm happy to be home (even if I’m writing this at 3am, once again fighting jetlag). The news has started to come out about AutoCAD 2015 – much of it fed by the Autodesk bloggers' day on Monday, which I unfortunately didn't attend – so it seemed timely for me to talk about the updates more from a developer’s perspective. Let's look at the major features of AutoCAD 2015, starting with the user interface enhancements. The... Read more →

Pier 9

This is without a doubt the coolest office Autodesk has anywhere in the world. Pier 9, on San Francisco’s waterfront, houses the Autodesk Consumer Group, including the Tinkercad and Instructables teams, as well as members of Autodesk Research and visiting artists-in-residence. And it has the most phenomenal workshops, kitted out with cutting-edge technology. I’d been hoping to visit for some time but this was really my first real opportunity since its official opening back in September. I wandered across from our 1 Market office (which is also pretty cool, but relatively lacking in toys ;-) with Gaurav Sachdeva, a... Read more →

Raster to vector conversion on the iPad

I was happy to see Scott’s announcement that a tool I’d seen demoed back at AU – and during my recent trip to Israel – has now been published to the iOS App Store (even if it’s really a Labs release, at this stage). It was developed by the Applied Research group in our Tel Aviv office, the team that brought you ShapeShifter. It’s an iPad app called Vectorize It that allows you to generate vectors from raster images – whether taken by the iPad’s camera or picked from its image gallery – with the capability of opening the... Read more →

Per-post sharing and Disqus comments

Some of you may have noticed a few changes that have been made to this blog over the last week or so. Firstly, I finally got around to implementing per-page sharing – for now via Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn – for individual blog posts. This took me longer than I’d have liked because I use Typepad Advanced Templates (which means I do a lot of hand-hacking of HTML to implement new features, giving more flexibility but requiring more work to do anything significant). If there are other social networks you’d like to share to – Pinterest, anyone? –... Read more →

San Francisco

It’s nice being back in the Bay Area. I got in on Monday night and took BART into the city, checking into the Hyatt Regency (just across the street from our 1 Market office). That first evening I caught up with my old team – the DevTech managers, now under Stephen Preston’s leadership – for dinner and then went for an over-priced green beer with my former boss, Jim Quanci. It was St. Patrick’s Day, after all. :-) Then it was a short night’s sleep before the usual jetlag woke me at 3:30am. On the plus side, it gave... Read more →

9 days to design an advertisement for Morgan 3 Wheeler

I saw an announcement for this competition back at Autodesk University 2013, but haven’t yet posted about it on this blog. The competition is now in its final stages – the deadline is on March 26, 2014 at 10am PST – but that means exactly 9 days left to enter from the time this post goes live. The concept is simple: you have to use one of three Autodesk products – Inventor, Showcase or 3ds Max – to create a rendering of the Morgan 3 Wheeler to be published as an advertisement in MOG Magazine. Aside from installing one... Read more →

Determining AutoCAD’s language using .NET

To follow on from yesterday’s post, today we’re going to look at a reliable way to determine the language of the AutoCAD product hosting your .NET module. Thanks to Troy Louden for sharing this technique. Here’s the C# code implementing it: using System.Globalization; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; namespace LanguageInfo { public class Commands { [CommandMethod("LANG")] public static void WhichLanguage() { var cult = new CultureInfo(SystemObjects.DynamicLinker.ProductLcid); Application.DocumentManager.MdiActiveDocument.Editor. WriteMessage( "\nLanguage of your AutoCAD product is {0}.", cult.EnglishName ); } } } When we run the code, we can see it simply tells us the language associated with the product’s “culture”. We’re... Read more →

Getting AutoCAD’s command-line arguments using .NET

I’m starting to get ready for a trip to the US: I’m heading out on Monday and will be home on Thursday of the following week. While I expect I’ll have time to write a few posts during the trip – thank you, jetlag! – I’m going to write a couple of very simple ones today and tomorrow, just to free up time for preparations. Both posts came out of an internal email discussion on trying to determine the language of the AutoCAD product your application is running in. The initial question was focused on getting this information from... Read more →

The Autodesk Foundation & coding for a cause

Many of you will have seen last week’s announcement about the creation of the Autodesk Foundation. The foundation has been set up to formalise something that’s long been part of Autodesk’s culture: supporting charitable causes through direct investment, software donation and matching of employee gifts. This formalisation will also bring greater alignment around our support for the broader design community, which is something that’s new. I’m particularly excited about changes being made to Autodesk’s employee volunteering program. As an Autodesk employee I’m able to spend 4 hours per month of company time volunteering for qualifying nonprofit organisations (political and... Read more →

Configuring 3 Wheelers at the Geneva Motor Show

Today marks the first public day of this year’s Geneva Motor Show. After having spent time on Monday setting up the configurator Autodesk provided to Morgan Motor Company, on Tuesday I went along to make sure everything was working well. It wasn’t exactly smooth sailing, but we got there. To start with, the connection from the iPad to the system performing the rendering work locally using Autodesk VRED – the iPad connection is the only part of the system that requiring wifi, we don’t actually use it for the rendering itself – was intermittent and very slow. I whipped... Read more →

Autodesk and Morgan at the Geneva Motor Show

Yesterday I had a really interesting day. I spent it at Geneva’s Palexpo exhibition centre, helping Morgan Motor Company set up their stand for this year’s Salon International de l”Auto & Accessoires (i.e. the 84th Geneva Motor Show). It was really cool being there before even the press were allowed in (they get to attend today and tomorrow), while most of the cars were still under wraps: I’ve been to the show – and visited the Morgan stand – before, but this year was very exciting for me as it marks the culmination of some months of collaboration between... Read more →

AutoCAD and Revit API training in Peru

Augusto Gonçalves, from our ADN team in Latin America, pointed me to the fact that we’re holding a Spanish-language AutoCAD .NET API training class in Lima, Peru on April 7-8, 2014 (followed by one on the Revit API on April 9). To register, please complete this survey. Read more →