Through the Interface

Signing off from 2014

Thank you for your readership and support during the last year. It’s really the interactions with this blog’s readers that motivate me to keep posting after 8½ years. As a small gesture of appreciation, here’s a simple HTML card that serves up random posts from this blog’s first 1,220 (or so). If you’re not interested by the post it shows when it loads, just click on the “Merry Christmas!” banner until you find one you feel like reading. The provided link will launch the post in a separate browser tab. In case you’re interested in the implementation details, the... Read more →

Extracting code from blog posts using F# – Part 1

I mentioned some weeks ago that I was looking to automate the validation of a bunch of source files I have on disk before uploading them to GitHub. I decided to get started on that, this week, to see what was involved. As mentioned in the previous post, I wanted to programmatically query posts from Typepad, extract any embedded code from them and compare it with what I had on disk, to see which files were already correct and which needed to be created or removed. The first step was to choose a language. The fact this is really... Read more →

Creating an associative fillet operation using ObjectARX

This is really cool. Fellow architect on the AutoCAD team, Jiri Kripac – who originally wrote AutoCAD’s “AModeler” facet modeler and is the driving force behind AutoCAD’s Associative Framework – has written a really interesting ObjectARX sample to perform an associative fillet between two curves. Given Jiri’s background, this is as close to a canonical sample for implementing an operation using the Associative Framework – in this case by creating a custom AcDbAssocActionBody – as you’re likely to find. Here’s a video showing this custom fillet in action, and how it can be used with parameters and expressions to... Read more →

AutoCAD 2015 APIs available via NuGet

We’ve received this request a few times in recent years: .NET developers have asked to be able to add dependencies on AutoCAD’s .NET reference assemblies – primarily acmgd.dll, acdbmgd.dll and accoremgd.dll – to their Visual Studio projects using the built-in package management tool, NuGet. For those of you unfamiliar with NuGet, it’s well worth checking out: it’s a really nice way to manage library dependencies in your .NET projects. Well, Christmas has come a few weeks early: the AutoCAD team has posted the 2015 .NET reference assemblies to NuGet. This is interesting to .NET developers for a number of... Read more →

Project Memento v1.10.12.1

The Memento product got some well-deserved airtime at Autodesk University 2014: it had prominent mentions during both the opening and closing keynotes. A new version has now been pushed live to Autodesk Labs and comes with some really useful enhancements. Full details can be found on Scott’s blog. I’ll start by talking about three enhancements I made use of for a specific project. My goal was to take some OBJ files – which had previously been generated from photos and exported by Memento – and set the coordinate system correctly for viewing in A360. Well, for use with the... Read more →

Titanic exhibition: that sinking feeling

Some friends from the UK were visiting Switzerland (although not staying with us) over the weekend, so we decided to meet them for dinner on Sunday at Geneva airport before their flight home. Thankfully I’d flown in from Las Vegas (and then Heathrow) to Zurich, the day before, otherwise visiting the same airport twice in one weekend would have seemed very weird. My wife suggested we go a little early (despite me being Vegas-lagged) and visit an exhibition she’d heard about at Palexpo (which is right at Geneva airport, and is also where the Geneva Motor Show takes place).... Read more →

Autodesk University 2014: Day 3

Autodesk University 2014 ended really well on Thursday. Despite me nearly showing up late for my final speaking engagement (I somehow had it in my head that it started at 1:30pm rather than 1:00pm – thankfully I chose to show up 32 minutes early!), the session itself went very well. It was the only one of my sessions that ended up being recorded (it wasn’t about AutoCAD, at all – it was all about the Geneva Motor Show project which was implemented using Autodesk VRED), and it was a fun one. The final keynote was, once again, very inspiring.... Read more →

Autodesk University 2014: Day 2

It’s suddenly Thursday morning. I feel like I’ve been in one of those hyperlapse videos since my last blog post. Here’s a quick update on what I’ve been up to. When I wrote my last post I was actually sitting in on Albert Szilvasy’s AutoCAD I/O session. This very interesting class was recorded so be sure to watch it when it comes online. From there I headed to the Exhibit Hall. This year the Exhibit Hall at AU is just incredible. I don’t know what’s changed, exactly, but I just love the way it’s been laid out. And I’ve... Read more →

Autodesk University 2014: Day 1

It’s Tuesday afternoon and we’re just one day into the main AU 2014 event. Yesterday’s pre-conference event was the ADN DevDay. It was nice to see my old team (although there were quite a few new faces since I was part of it) take to the stage in a room that was pretty much packed to capacity: During his keynote our SVP of Industry Strategy and Marketing, Andrew Anagnost, talked about the upcoming business model transformation from perpetual to term-based licensing. Then followed a number of technical presentations about Autodesk’s PaaS layer – especially the View & Data API... Read more →

Autodesk University 2014 live online + my class schedule

Even if you weren’t able to make it across to Las Vegas for AU, this week, then you can still attend the opening keynote, innovation forums, closing session and a number of key classes via live streaming video. Apparently an additional 200+ classes will be recorded for AU Online, but I don’t know which – if any – of mine will be. Here are links to the events/sessions in which I’m participating in some way, should you want to check out the posted handouts, samples and presentations. I’ve put them in chronological order, so people lucky enough to be... Read more →