Through the Interface

Join DevDays Online to learn what’s coming with Autodesk platform technology

There’s a series of webinars starting next week that will help you get a grip on what’s coming with various Autodesk platforms, both cloud-based and desktop. It’s also a chance to catch up on some of the content that was presented at last year’s DevCons. All the below webinars start at the same time: 8am PST | 11am EST | 4pm GMT | 5pm CET. Don’t worry if that time’s inconvenient, recordings will be made available soon after the webinars are finished. Please note that while some of the sessions (the last three in the below list) require Autodesk... Read more →

The Forge Design Automation API now has (Beta) support for Revit

There’s great news for Forge developers looking to modify Revit models – or perform various other operations inside Revit – in the cloud. To complement the current offerings of AutoCAD, Inventor and 3ds Max in Forge’s Design Automation API, you can now run headless Revit in the cloud, too. As of Monday of this week the service moved from invitation-only Beta to public Beta. Here’s an introduction to this service from the most recent Forge DevCon: This is really interesting with respect to Dasher 360, for instance. We currently have a workflow where an admin user can place sensors... Read more →

DevDays Online

For those of you who (like me) missed this year’s in-person DevDays – or perhaps have colleagues who would benefit from seeing sessions you managed to attend yourself in Las Vegas or elsewhere – you’ll be interested to hear that DevDays Online will be disseminating all that DevDays goodness over the wire during the month of February. The great news is that this isn’t being limited to ADN members: anyone can sign up and attend. The sessions will also be recorded, in case any are at times that don’t work for you. You can register to attend the various... Read more →

Accelerating in Munich

It’s been a hectic – but very fun – few days in Munich, working with a group of 60-70 developers from all over Europe who are getting started with Autodesk’s cloud services. I’m particularly focused on those working with AutoCAD I/O, which means probably 5-6 companies in total. Here’s a quick summary of some of the problems that have come up, many of which are for pure AutoCAD… Draw Order warning One developer has a long-running custom operation that presents the following message: AutoCAD Warning: This operation may take a long time. To greatly improve performance, the system can... Read more →

AU 2015 handout: Integrating .NET Code with AutoCAD I/O to Add Design Intelligence to Your Website

With the clock ticking before next week’s AU 2015, here’s the second of my class handouts (here’s a link to the first). For those of you lucky enough to be heading to this year’s event, see you in Vegas! Introduction During the course of this session, we’re going to look at the steps required to implement a web-site for turning pictures into jigsaw puzzles. We’re not going to go quite as far as creating the puzzles, themselves, but rather the DWG or DWF files that can be used to drive a laser cutter to do the work. The premise... Read more →

The future of VR is web and mobile

Last night, I left the (very fun) party at the X Summit a little early: partly because I knew I was presenting this morning and needed a clear head, but mainly to attend a WebVR meet-up being held at Mozilla. I’m rarely in the Bay Area and it seemed a shame to miss the opportunity to attend the event, especially as it was a chance to hang out with Jim Quanci and Goran Borjesson, a colleague visiting from Gothenberg. I’ll describe my experiences of the evening’s proceedings, but you can also watch the online recording. It was really an... Read more →

AutoCAD I/O v2

The AutoCAD I/O team has deployed version 2 of their API. For specific information on what’s new, check this page. As I’ll be talking about AutoCAD I/O at AU 2015, I thought it important to get to grips with the new version and understand how it differs from v1. I went ahead and updated Jigsawify.com to make use of the new API, so I’ll add my own commentary below on the changes that have been introduced. As a reminder, the full source code for Jigsawify.com is available on GitHub. To check out the specific migration changes, see this comparison... 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 →

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 →

Let’s get physical: laser cutting the output from Jigsawify.com

After building a web-site to create files that help make laser-cuttable jigsaws, it made sense to actually go ahead and cut some. In the flesh, so to speak. My initial findings weren’t good: I’d assumed that I could output 2D solids from AutoCAD – each representing a pixel to be engraved on the jigsaw – and that the laser cutting software (in our case LaserCut 5.3) would at least see the boundaries. But nothing at all loaded – apart from the cutting geometry for the pieces, of course. In fairness, the question has come up a few times as... Read more →

Jigsawify.com goes mobile-friendly

After going down the path of making this blog responsive, it made sense to do the same for Jigsawify.com: I think it’s a really nice illustration of the potential for AutoCAD I/O to use the web-site from your mobile phone to generate a DWG in the cloud. The site itself was functional enough on mobile: the issue related more to making the UI usable without having to zoom in and out all the time both to see the results and then use the various UI elements. The “responsive” technology underpinning the Typepad template I used for this blog is... Read more →

Passing large amounts of data to an AutoCAD I/O activity

I mentioned recently that I’d hit a limitation with the amount of data that could be passed as embedded JSON data to an AutoCAD I/O Activity, and so decided to rearchitect my site to post the data at a URL and have the Activity download and use the data from there. The system worked well until a security flaw was fixed by the AutoCAD I/O team, earlier this week: it turns out the approach of manually downloading the additional payload from the Activity itself wasn’t supposed to work. And now, sure enough, it doesn’t. :-) This video does a... Read more →

Jigsawify.com: Creating custom jigsaw puzzles using AutoCAD I/O

After the last post, where we looked at the first couple of architecture iterations for Jigsawify.com, it’s time to summarise (and perhaps even wrap-up) this series… Here are the posts so far: Puzzling over laser cutters AutoCAD I/O and custom applications Finishing up our laser-cut jigsaw project Running custom .NET code in the cloud using AutoCAD I/O – Part 1 Running custom .NET code in the cloud using AutoCAD I/O – Part 2 Running custom .NET code in the cloud using AutoCAD I/O – Part 3 Running custom .NET code in the cloud using AutoCAD I/O – Part 4... Read more →

Architecting my first AutoCAD I/O application

As mentioned in this recent post, I’ve been working on my AutoCAD I/O-driven web-site on and off for the last few weeks. Lately I’ve had to think beyond certain assumptions I’d made about its architecture, and I thought it worth sharing those thoughts here. The intention of the site is that you upload an image and then see some edge detection get performed on it, generating an engraving layer for a custom jigsaw puzzle. AutoCAD I/O gets used to generate a drawing that can drive a laser cutter, creating your 100% unique jigsaw puzzle. Basically making the world a... Read more →

Visualizing the AutoCAD I/O API

I’ve been working with AutoCAD I/O quite heavily over the last week or two – mainly spending time fleshing out my Jigsawify web application well in advance of AU2015 – and came across this helpful trick for visualizing an OData-based REST API graphically: you can copy and paste the XML schema for the AutoCAD I/O API into a file and then load it into the handy XOData tool. Here’s what was generated (after a little editing from my side for layout): I’m making pretty good progress using AutoCAD I/O from Node.js – which is interesting as I can now... 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 →

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 →