AutoCAD .NET


  • 20 years of blogging

    During my recent travels I managed to be away for a couple of anniversaries. My youngest child turned 17, and this blog turned 20. A definite "how did that happen?" on both fronts. So yes, on June 19th, 2006, I posted for the first time to "Through the Interface". It was actually an experiment that came out of a brainstorming the Autodesk Developer Network team had gone through some weeks earlier, where one of the ideas that was proposed (OK yes, it was by me) was to start a developer-centric Autodesk blog. By this time Shaan Hurley had been blogging…


  • Left to My Own Devices: I join the TRXL podcast for episode 152

    Some weeks ago I joined Evan Troxel for a couple of hours to chat about my journey and some of the projects I've worked on. I've enjoyed the TRXL podcast for some time, so it was a real honour to be invited on. Our discussion has just been published as episode 152.     If you prefer video, here's the version from YouTube:     Evan's a great interviewer: I enjoyed the session a great deal and I hope you do, too. Listening back to it I realize there's a lot more we could have talked about… hopefully Evan will…


  • The next release of AutoCAD and .NET

    This post may feel like a blast from the past for any long-time readers still out there. After a break of several years, I'm once again posting about the topic this blog was founded (17 years ago!) to help people get to grips with: AutoCAD and .NET. This is definitely a blip rather than a trend, however: I just wanted to amplify this post by my friend Madhu Moogala, which talks at a very high level about the next release of AutoCAD (2024+1) and its API technology. Cutting to the chase, the nugget of information that interested me most is…


  • DevDays 2021, AutoCAD Web APIs and Forge Coffee Breaks

    The material for this year's online Autodesk DevDays is now live on YouTube. These sessions were held back in March, but now that the various products discussed have been released publicly, the information has been made available for everyone (i.e. not only covered by the Non-Disclosure Agreement signed by Autodesk Developer Network members, the famously palindromic ADN NDA). Here's the full playlist, if you want to watch it here: Here are links to the individual sessions: Autodesk DevDays 2021 keynotes Inventor, Vault and Fusion API update AutoCAD API update Revit API update Civil 3D update One interesting tidbit from the…


  • Join us for DevDays Online

    Not everyone can make it to the Forge team's annual DevCon events, so luckily they also run a set of online webinars covering similar content. Here's a brief schedule of their upcoming webinars – for more specifics, please head on over to their blog post. Note that some of these webinars are only open to members of the Autodesk Developer Network (if they relate to our desktop products). All of the webinars are held at 8am PST (4pm GMT, 5pm CET, 11am EST), and will be recorded if the timing doesn't work for you. Tuesday February 25 - DevDays Keynotes…


  • 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 Developer…


  • A brief history of rearchitecting AutoCAD (or the importance of R13)

    Over the weekend I received an email from Jürgen Becker. It came with this image, which certainly brought back memories. The email referred to our recent trip down memory lane… I read your last post and remembered a poster. Do you remember that release, it was terrible? This is one of my favourite "chat over a beer" topics, and one that seems relevant to where we are today with Fabric, so I wrote Jürgen a quick note to say that I'd reply via my blog. Here is that reply. R13 was bad, but it had to happen I joined Autodesk…


  • Integrating the 3dRudder with AutoCAD

    I mentioned this device, late last year, and have been meaning to spend time integrating it into AutoCAD ever since. The 3dRudder is an interesting perpheral: while currently targeted at helping seated VR users navigate intuitively in 3D – effectively keeping their hands free – it was originally intended for CAD users. So it's nice that it's going back to its roots, as it were. Here's an excerpt of a video of Christian Slater demoing the 3dRudder integration with Rhino (I'm kidding about it being Christian Slater – he just looks a bit like him :-). Over the last few…


  • AutoCAD 2018 has been released

    While I'm not spending much time working with AutoCAD, these days, I've been waiting impatiently for the release of AutoCAD 2018 (codenamed "Omega"). There's one key feature, in particular, that I've been waiting for – but more on that later. From a user perspective you can find information on the new release in this blog post and this preview guide. There's also a subset covered in this intro video, if that's your preference:     Here are a few notes on the major user features. Some of these features were already part of the 2017.1 release, but many people will…


  • Jigging an AutoCAD leader with directional text using .NET

    I'm sure some of you will be relieved to see I can still (more or less) manage to write code for AutoCAD… the last few days I've been feeling quite under-the-weather, so today's post is a little bit of "comfort code": sometimes while you're brain is struggling to handle the unfamiliar, it's very happy to tackle the familiar. At least that was the plan, and the reason I decided to tackle this recent question from Thomas Heitz: I would like to write an code to change automatically the structure label style while dragging the label. So I created two labels…