Through the Interface

Changing the border colour of an AutoCAD raster image using .NET

This is a question that came up at the recent Cloud Accelerator in Prague: how can you change the border colour for all raster image objects in the drawing? We could do this by placing the raster image on a particular layer, but the developer was looking for a global override. The answer ended up being really simple with a DrawableOverrule. Here’s some C# code that does this: using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.GraphicsInterface; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; namespace RasterImageOverrule { public class RasterImageDisplayOverrule : DrawableOverrule { public short Color { get; set; } public override void ViewportDraw(Drawable d,... Read more →

Birdly, a different kind of flight simulator

Birdly is an immersive Virtual Reality experience that let’s you fly like a bird through virtual cityscapes. To get a sense for how it works, check out this video: Birdly - Splitscreen from maxR on Vimeo I first heard about Birdly from Brian Kling, a friend and colleague in our Neuchâtel office who tried it out earlier this year at the Lift conference in Geneva. He came back really excited about the exhibit, and his excitement was contagious. Since then I’ve been looking for an opportunity to experience it firsthand. I’m happy to say the opportunity finally presented itself,... Read more →

Applying an operation to all the entities in an AutoCAD drawing using .NET

In the last post we saw a “general” function to erase all the entities in a drawing that fulfill a specified condition. We used it to erase all the zero-length lines in a drawing. But as I’d mentioned at the end, I thought there was an opportunity to generalize the mechanism even further. Here’s what I came up with (and I’ve included a suggestion by Parrish Husband to create an additional extension method for Curve.IsZeroLength()). using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Geometry; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; using System; namespace ZeroLengthEntities { public static class Extensions { ///

/// Performs an operation... Read more →

Detecting and erasing zero-length lines in an AutoCAD drawing using .NET

A question came in by email, yesterday, and despite having a few mini-projects in progress that were spawned during last week’s event in Prague, I couldn’t resist putting some code together to address it. The developer wanted to purge zero-length geometry: the simplest way to solve the problem is to run “_-PURGE _Z” at the command-line, but I saw this more as an opportunity to create a simple helper that would loop through all the entities in a drawing and erase any meeting a specified condition. In this case it would be curves with a length less than the... Read more →

Robosphere

After getting home late on Friday from the Cloud Accelerator in Prague, on Saturday morning we celebrated my son’s 9th birthday (how time flies) with a party for his classmates at Robosphere in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the heart of the Swiss watch-making industry. A fun fact: this town has also had a major impact on both architecture and the automotive industry, being the birthplace of Le Corbusier and Louis Chevrolet. Robosphere is a local organisation dedicated to increasing awareness of robotics and related fields. They have a couple of options for birthday parties: we opted for the “Primo” package –... Read more →

Creating an AutoCAD palette dynamically to launch commands and methods tagged using .NET

I needed to run some code from a modeless dialog, the other day, and found it was a bit of a pain to generate something quickly to do so. So I thought it might be a good idea to populate a palette dynamically with buttons that call commands and methods that were somehow tagged in the current project. The first step was to work out how to tag them: the obvious choice being some kind of method-level designation (much as we have with the CommandMethod() attribute). I created a command – named PC, for PaletteCommands – that uses reflection... Read more →

At the Cloud Accelerator in Prague

We’re about halfway through the first Cloud Accelerator Extension being held in the incredible city of Prague. The entire European ADN team is in town – so a great chance to catch up with old friends such as Jeremy, Adam, Philippe, Cyrille and Peter – along with cloud-focused developers from Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Romania, Italy, Greece, Israel and (of course) the Czech Republic. So definitely making new friends, too. :-) I’m mainly here to help developers working with AutoCAD I/O – gathering feedback for the development team, in the process – and it’s really... Read more →

Intersecting AutoCAD curves with a plane using .NET

This question came in via a comment, last week: Is it possible to get the point of intersection between a spline/3dpolyline and a plane surface? It turned out to be quite an interesting problem to solve. I started with brute force methods for the various curve types… For Polylines I checked linear segments against the plane (this is an intersection we can test), and for arc segments I broke these into linear segments and checked those, too. It all worked well with a high enough “resolution” for arc segments. Polyline3ds only have linear segments, so I could safely use... Read more →

Playing Zork inside AutoCAD

The nostalgia is strong in this one. (In both this post and this blogger, in case you’re wondering.) It started with my 20th anniversary at Autodesk, but it got worse, last weekend, when I travelled to the UK to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the University of Kent (where I studied, back in the day, about halfway through its history). I’d coordinated with a couple of close friends, so we descended on Canterbury from Switzerland, Connecticut and Windsor, and joined a thousand or so alumni for a really fun, celebratory weekend, revisiting old haunts and sharing old memories. Doubling... Read more →

Unmerging cells in an AutoCAD table using .NET

A question came in, last week, via a comment on this post. Daniel wanted to unmerge the title cells of a table: Very nice tutorial. based on this I manange to create the VB. NET code for my table style, but I face with a problem that I could not change the Title to be unmerged. In this moment, as default, it is merged and I want it to have it not merged. What is code for this ? I tried to find it out by ts.SetCellClass(RowType.TitleRow, MergeCellStyleOption.None but is not working. i get error on: sd.UpgradeOpen() line I... Read more →

Fusion 360 Hackathon

There’s another online Hackathon in town, this time for Fusion 360. It’s running from September 23 to October 30, 2015, so a reasonable period during which you can create your first Fusion 360 app using JavaScript, Python or C++. I don’t know much about Fusion 360 development, but I’m looking forward to learning more during this event. This is a great chance to start working early on with one of Autodesk’s hottest new platform technologies. And to get Autodesk not only to help you with your development, but also to compensate you for your efforts! (You can receive $500... Read more →

I <3 DWG Meetup in Prague

I’ll be in Prague – with Adam Nagy from the ADN team – on Tuesday of next week (from 6 to 9pm on September 8, 2015) to talk to people about Autodesk’s horizontal PaaS offerings, notably the AutoCAD I/O and View & Data web services. If you happen to be in the area and are interested in attending, please sign up and come on by the Autodesk Prague office on Tuesday evening! From my side I’m going to talk about the implementation details relating to the use of Autodesk web services in Jigsawify and Vrok-It. It should be a... Read more →

Launching AutoCAD’s REFEDIT command with an entity selected using .NET

A really interesting problem came up during an internal discussion, this week: someone wanted to launch the REFEDIT command on a selected xref and pre-select the entity found at the picked point. The entity that’s part of the selected xref, of course. This turned out to be quite a tricky problem and yet one that could be solved with relatively few lines of code. The tricky parts were finding the right entity in the nested selection and then the corresponding entity in the xref. Here’s the approach I ended up taking: Ask the user to selected a nested entity... Read more →