Through the Interface

Preventing an AutoCAD block from being exploded using .NET (redux)

When I was a boy, I used to love going to play with toys at my grandmother’s house. My absolute favourite was a die-cast Batmobile made by Corgi in the UK. What I particularly liked about this toy was its hidden features: the cars apparently came with secret instructions, although these were nowhere to be seen by the time I started playing with it. The Batmobile had plastic flames that came out of the exhaust when the rear wheels turned and spring-loadable, vertical rocket launchers. The biggest surprise was when I discovered the cutting blade that popped out of... Read more →

The millionth download from Autodesk Exchange Apps

Quite a milestone has just been passed: more than a million apps have now been downloaded from Autodesk Exchange. The store has been running for a little over three years and is apparently home to over 1,800 apps in 14 languages that are available for download in 191 countries. Wow. Be sure to check out Autodesk Exchange Apps for AutoCAD, the largest of our various stores. Here’s a quick video celebrating this momentous event: I’m about to head home from Singapore after a great week at the Autodesk Technical Summit 2015. I’ll try to share some impressions once I’m... Read more →

The next Autodesk Cloud Accelerator is in… Prague!

After the first two successful Cloud Accelerators held in San Francisco, it’s time to go international. The next one, labeled a Cloud Accelerator Extension, is being held in the beautiful Czech city of Prague from September 13-18, 2015. This is a great opportunity to kick-start your development using Autodesk’s PaaS infrastructure. Members of the ADN and Engineering teams – me included – will be on-hand to help you work through any development issues you hit while creating or honing your Autodesk Cloud API-integrated application. So come join me in Prague for a fun week of cloud-oriented development. All you... Read more →

Football and technology

Looks like this week is going to be all about sweat. Hopefully there won’t be blood and tears to go along with it. On Friday I drove with my family across to Verona, Italy, for Autodesk’s annual football (soccer) tournament. This year was incredible: 20 teams from around the world showed up with around 600 people (between the players and supporters). We had hoped that Google Maps’ estimate of the length of the drive would more or less accurate at 5 hours 40 minutes, but – through no fault of Google’s – it ended up taking a brutal 8... Read more →

9 years

It’s insane how the years tick past. Today marks the 9th anniversary of Through the Interface. For a bit of fun, I’ve added an Easter Egg (well, actually it’s more like a Birthday Cake) to Vrok.it: Choose the “Cake” button on the left to view a Birthday Cake modelled completely using AutoCAD. If you connect to the session using the QR code, you can see the birthday cake in stereoscopic 3D on your smartphone using Google Cardboard. Or without it, if you’re good at squinting. In case you’re interested, the mechanics of creating the 3D text in AutoCAD were... Read more →

Running custom .NET code in the cloud using AutoCAD I/O – Part 4

Now that we’ve introduced how the CRX will be loaded by AutoCAD I/O – via an Autoloader bundle – we’re going to take a look at the code needed to create and test our Activity using it. As a starting point – and as mentioned last time – you should get hold of the code in this sample on GitHub and copy & paste the (C# & XML) code we’ve seen in the last two posts into their respective files. The code we’re going to see in today’s post belongs in Client\Program.cs. We’re very much tailoring the existing implementation,... Read more →

Running custom .NET code in the cloud using AutoCAD I/O – Part 3

After introducing the series and looking at the additional code needed for a .NET CRX app to work with AutoCAD I/O, in this post we’re going to go the extra small step to prepare the Autoloader manifest, getting it ready to create the Activity and its AppPackage. To simplify the process of developing this app, I recommend a couple of things: download the sample on GitHub I pointed you at, last time – whether by cloning the project or downloading it as a ZIP – and make modifications directly to that. To build the sample I’m creating, for instance,... Read more →

Running custom .NET code in the cloud using AutoCAD I/O – Part 2

As promised yesterday, this post deals with modifying your CRX module to make it work with AutoCAD I/O. A quick reminder on what writing a CRX app means for .NET developers: we’re still creating a .DLL (unlike ObjectARX developers, whose CRX modules have the .crx extension), but it can only reference AcDbMgd.dll and AcCoreMgd.dll (not AcMgd.dll). Importantly the module must be loadable – and testable – in the Core Console. The basic C# code we’re going to extend is from this previous post. The real change that’s required for commands to work in AutoCAD I/O is how they get... Read more →

Running custom .NET code in the cloud using AutoCAD I/O – Part 1

Over the coming weeks I’m going to be exploring – and blogging about – the ability to run custom .NET code inside AutoCAD I/O. After all, I’ve submitted an AU class on the topic, so I really do need to get my head around it. :-) I see this series being made up of the following high-level tasks, although each of these may end up requiring multiple posts to cover (and conversely there may be some that can be covered in a single post): Writing a CRX module that’s I/O-ready Building an Autoloader bundle for the CRX module Defining... Read more →

A fun, collaborative VR tool: can you Vrok-it?

It’s live! Our entry for the recent VR Hackathon in San Francisco has received a significant amount of spit and polish (OK, perhaps not the best mental image) over the last couple of weeks and is now ready for prime time (i.e. Beta testing ;-). Check it out at http://vrok.it! It should work well with Chrome, Firefox or Safari, although for best results I’d stick with Chrome on mobile devices. The term “vrok” is one I came up with on the trip back from San Francisco… it’s a combination of an invented acronym – Virtual Reality Online Collaboration –... Read more →

Our collaborative VR demo from the recent Hackathon

I wanted to post on a more in-depth topic, today, but I’ve been heads-down working on our project from the recent VR Hackathon, getting ready to push it live. We’ve made really good progress over the last few days, especially considering it’s only a part-time project for Lars, Oleg and myself. We’ve implemented per-session support and a number of other important features (Lars has also spent some serious time re-factoring the code – it’s certainly more elegant than what I’d usually crank out ;-). The code is all here, in case. Here’s a quick audio-less demo, to give you... Read more →

Finishing up our laser-cut jigsaw project

I spent some time back down at our local Fab Lab, today, finishing the laser cutting work for the jigsaw project I mentioned previously. Since I last mentioned it, we managed to procure some Plexiglas – in our case it was Perspex, in fact – and cut various sections of the puzzle, with each piece including an engraved word and a hole to make it into a key-chain souvenir. Today’s job needed the additional size of the Fab Lab’s laser cutter – theirs can cut sheets with 40cm on a side, whereas ours can only manage 30cm – as... Read more →

Through the Interface goes “responsive”

As promised (threatened?) back in February, this blog has finally received a much-needed design refresh. I had hoped to get our internal creative team to help with this, but that unfortunately didn’t pan out: all issues that you come across are therefore the responsibility of yours truly. Here are the key changes in this refresh: Based on Typepad’s “Snap” responsive design template Switched to new fonts: Lato for titles and headings, Open Sans for body text Displays excerpts rather than full posts on the home page and post indices/archives The intention is that the blog be much more readable... Read more →