Through the Interface

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... Read more →

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... Read more →

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 →

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... Read more →

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... Read more →

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 be... Read more →

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... Read more →

HoloGuide: an Autodesk Hackathon project

Over the last few days we’ve held Autodesk’s first internal, global Hackathon. I started off by not wanting to join a team – I did sign up as an “evangelist”, which it turns out means I’m also a judge – but in the end I decided to create a simple HoloLens application. And then Jeremy Tammik suggested we join forces, so we actually were a team, all of a sudden. From my side I focused on creating the HoloLens application – which receives path information from somewhere and displays that to the user – as well as the 2D... Read more →

Connecting points to curves by the shortest distance in AutoCAD using .NET – Part 2

In the last post we saw a simple command that connects a block with a curve via a line that starts at the insertion point and meets the curve at its closest point. In this post we’re going to see how we can search the modelspace for the nearest curve and connect each block to that. There are a few interesting techniques used in this post’s code: We use the dynamic keyword to count the block references for a particular block without starting a transaction (as we’re still in the user input phase, at that point). We’re going to... Read more →

Connecting points to curves by the shortest distance in AutoCAD using .NET – Part 1

A question came into the LISP forum during Wednesday’s Answer Day. It related to a really interesting task: to take certain blocks in a drawing and connect them to the closest polyline via a perpendicular line. It took me a little while to understand, but basically the problem relates to pipeline design: there are gully posts – represented as blocks – that need to be connected to pipelines (polylines) in the drawing. They need to be connected by the shortest path, which will be perpendicular to the pipeline (assuming the pipeline is long enough, of course). It was too... Read more →

The AutoCAD Answer Day is starting…

As mentioned, last week, I’m going to be hanging out in the AutoCAD .NET forum for the next few hours. I’ll try to do a little live blogging here… so check back often. And remember to join me in the Google Hangout! 15:10 CEST / 6:10 PDT Sitting here with at Autodesk Neuchatel with Celine and Camilo (aka ^CEL and ^CAM from AutodeskHelp), waiting for the questions to come in. 16:50 CEST / 7:50 PDT Well, the Hangout was interesting. On the one hand, I didn’t realise you had to enable Q&A before launching the “Hangout On Air”, but... Read more →

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 →