Through the Interface

Ask Me Anything at next week’s Autodesk Answer Day

One year ago Autodesk held our first ever Answer Day for people to get answers regarding the use of AutoCAD (and its APIs). While I didn’t participate in the original event, myself, I was pleased to see a new approach being tried for connecting users of our products with the people who create them. You can think of these Answer Days as a kind of AMA for Autodesk software. The original event paved the way for several others and all have proven to be worthwhile: not just for Autodesk customers struggling with frustrating probems but for the Autodesk employees... Read more →

Merging AutoCAD blocks using .NET

I decided to dust off Visual Studio and write a quick AutoCAD app, this morning. It tackles a question received via a blog comment from Pankaj Potdar, over the weekend. I have two blocks with different attributes I want to merge them in single block, and I don't want to create any nested blocks. I haven’t had much time to spend on AutoCAD, of late. Part of the reason has been work-related: I’m heads-down getting the VR/AR track in shape for the upcoming Forge DevCon, as well as spending time on new duties in Autodesk Research. The other part... Read more →

AutoCAD Developer Documentation Survey 2016

The AutoCAD team is running their annual survey to better understand developers’ needs relating to documentation. Access the survey here before the end of May. Lee Ambrosius provides more information over on his blog, including some interesting data-points from last year’s survey as well as areas of the documentation that were influenced by it. Read more →

AutoCAD 2017 for developers

Yesterday Autodesk announced the availability of AutoCAD 2017, code-named “Nautilus”. We use consecutive letters in the alphabet for AutoCAD code names, and as 2016 was “Maestro” it’s natural that 2017 would begin with an N. For those of you who’re wondering, the code name is indeed a reference to the graphics used for the AutoCAD R12 product. Here’s my R12 AutoLISP reference, where you can see the inspiration… To find out what’s new in AutoCAD 2017 from a product perspective, head on over to Heidi Hewett’s post on the AutoCAD blog or visit autodesk.com. You can also watch Mike... Read more →

Sorting lists of AutoCAD objects using LINQ – Part 3

After seeing a basic approach to sort arrays of ObjectIds using LINQ – and then refactoring that to be a shared extension method to be used on arrays of ObjectIds – today we’re going to see that code refactored, once again, to work with types of data other than strings (up until now we could only sort objects based on string properties such as class and layer names). One solid approach for creating operations that can deal with different types of object – while maintaining type safety – is to use template classes, which are known as generic classes... Read more →

Sorting lists of AutoCAD objects using LINQ – Part 2

In the last post we took a look at one technique to sort a list of ObjectIds by the associated objects’ layer and type. In this post we’re going to refactor the commonality to have a single extension method that allows us to sort a list of ObjectIds based on any string property. Here’s the updated C# code: using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; namespace ProcessObjectsInOrder { public static class Extensions { ///

/// Sorts an array of ObjectIds based on a string property and order. ///

/// Read more →

Sorting lists of AutoCAD objects using LINQ – Part 1

I received this interesting question by email from Henrik Ericson, last week. Is it possible to sort the selected objects (only 3dFaces in my case) in a SelectionSet by their layers? I want to process all the objects, one layer at a time. In other words, first all objects on layer A, and then all objects on layer B and then C and so on. In my case it isn't necessary to process the layers alphabetically. It’s especially interesting as I’d just been thinking of approaches for sorting toolbars based on an index property, to get the code in... Read more →

Disabling AutoCAD tooltips using .NET

I wasn’t planning on posting to this blog again, this week – three times per week is enough, I find, so I tend to save any leftovers for the week after – but this question James Maeding asked is very much related to this week’s posts, and – in any case – I already have three fun posts planned for next week. :-) Here’s the question James asked, again: wish I had something to make tooltips disappear when needed. I like them on for many things, but then they get in the way sometimes, and you have to cancel... Read more →

Disabling AutoCAD’s complete UI using .NET

In the first post in this series, we saw how to disable AutoCAD’s ribbon. In the second post, we saw how to make (with some caveats) AutoCAD’s toolbars disappear. In this post we’re going to throw all that away and show how to get better results with a single line of code. But before all that, a big “thanks” to both James Meading and Alexander Rivilis, who have helped us get to this point. James pointed out a fairly significant flaw in yesterday’s toolbar-hiding code (hence the mention of caveats, above), in that it didn’t place toolbars on... Read more →

Disabling AutoCAD’s toolbars using .NET

It turns out that the forum request I attempted to cover in the last post – handily re-interpreted to deal with something I knew how to do ;-) – was in fact about toolbars, rather than the ribbon. In this post we’re going to look at how to disable toolbars – and re-enable them – using .NET, so that Pete’s original request is dealt with. To start with, there’s no real way to grey out toolbars via the API – at least not at the toolbar level, perhaps it can be done per toolbar item – so I’ve opted... Read more →

Disabling the AutoCAD ribbon using .NET

I came across this interesting question on the AutoCAD .NET forum, posted by Pete Elliott: When AutoCAD is loading, I see that my toolbars are disabled (grayed-out) until the loading has finished. Our company does some additional data loading after AutoCAD has become idle. But if the user clicks certain custom toolbar buttons while our additional data is loading, AutoCAD fatal errors. Is there a way we can disable the toolbars (like AutoCAD does) until our loading is finished, and then enable them? I haven't been able to locate an API that provides this capability. Any suggestions greatly appreciated!... Read more →

Securing your AutoCAD app using .NET

Many, many thanks for the congratulatory messages I received after my last post, whether via this blog, Twitter, LinkedIn or email. I was genuinely overwhelmed by the response! :-) Here’s a post I’ve been meaning to write for some time: a common question I’ve seen, over the years, is about how best to implement copy protection or licensing in your application. While this post doesn’t fully address that requirement, it does show you how to use a REST API to check the user entitlement for your application via the Autodesk App Store (formerly known as Autodesk Exchange Apps). This... Read more →

Capturing an image of the current AutoCAD document using .NET

This is a topic that has been addressed a few times on this blog, whether by posts that use the 3D graphics system to capture screenshots or the series of posts regarding the Screenshot Plugin of the Month from a few years ago. I thought it worth revisiting, though, as I noticed an API that I hadn’t used before and decided to put it through its paces. The API is a simple one – Document.CapturePreviewImage() – and it’s been covered before on the AutoCAD DevBlog. But I thought I’d take some file-selection code from the Screenshot app and see... Read more →

Unlocking layers for certain AutoCAD commands using .NET

This question came up during last week’s accelerator, and is part of the reason I spent creating the last post: is it possible to selectively unlock certain layers for the duration of commands that have been specified by the user? Let’s take an example: you have layers that should remain locked, apart from when using the MOVE command (COPY and ERASE should not work). The approach I took was to maintain a dictionary mapping command names to lists of layers to unlock. When a command is launched – which we can tell using the Document.CommandWillStart event – we check... Read more →

Locking and unlocking AutoCAD layers visibly using .NET

On Friday I visited Munich Airport: not only to catch a flight home to Switzerland but also to take a look at some AutoCAD issues frustrating the developers working on the airport’s facilities management system. During the course of the day we were able to work through a number of problems – such as using COM (SendCommand()) to run a script synchronously as well as to get the fill pattern for MPolygon objects (this is apparently broken in .NET) – but there was one I had to bring home with me: when locking and unlocking layers programmatically, their geometry... Read more →

A visit to Baufritz

Knowing how thoroughly I’d enjoyed my visit to JPF-DUCRET with them, our friends at hsbcad suggested I tag along to a visit they were making to the leading maker of ecological, pre-fabricated homes in Germany, Baufritz. So yesterday Peter Schlipf (from our ADN team) and I headed across to the Baufritz office in Erkheim, about an hour’s drive west of Munich. On the way we met with colleague Krisztian Hegedus, who happens to live in a Baufritz home and was also keen to find out more about the company who’d built it. At Baufritz we were welcomed by Kris... 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 →

Controlling robots from inside AutoCAD – Part 4

I wasn’t planning on writing another part in this series, just yet, but then I got a little carried away with some refactoring work and decided it deserved a post of its own. I wasn’t fully happy with the code in the last post. The DecomposeCurve() function simply did too much: it opened a curve, extracted the points we were interested in and then created “movement” strings for each segment connecting the points. So the function was just way too single-purpose, even if a number of the individual operations being performed could potentially have been of use elsewhere. So... Read more →

Controlling robots from inside AutoCAD – Part 3

After seeing how we can use Cylon.js to control Sphero’s Ollie and BB-8 robots from a browser, and then using the same mechanism from inside a custom AutoCAD command, today we’re going to drive these cute little bots based on AutoCAD geometry. The idea is that we’ll decompose regular curves – whether lines, arcs, polylines or splines – and use the “segments” as movement instructions for our robots. The approach is simple enough: we’ll iterate along the length of each selected curve and generate a set of instructions – really just a set of angles – for the associated... Read more →

Controlling robots from inside AutoCAD – Part 2

After looking at how to control robots using Cylon.js in the last post, in this post we’re going to get that working inside AutoCAD. For now with just a command that allows us to move the robots – in a future post we’ll analyse geometry and use that to specify the movements. The “controller” code we saw in the last post needed a little updating for use in this way. I went ahead and stripped out the keyboard-related code – as we’re using behind a web-service – and added the capability to control individual robots. We want to be... Read more →