Through the Interface

Transitioning from summer mode

Life seems to have shifted quite radically this week, as the summer here in Switzerland starts drawing to a close. A Sunday morning storm reset the temperature to something more autumnal (although these are looking to climb again gradually - we’re not completely done with warm days here, thankfully) and all of my three children started their respective schools again on Monday. The two youngest are once again in the same institution - they’re in the first and last years of our local “lycée” (the Denis-de-Rougement in Neuchâtel), which is the three years of post-mandatory schooling that often precedes... Read more →

Batch conversion between DWF and DWFx

Over on Beyond the Paper, Volker Joseph has posted a DWF Toolkit console application that can be used to batch-convert between the DWF and DWFx formats. Read more →

Accessing the hidden _name property via the Design Review API

It seems that the approach for accessing the "_name" property - a hidden property often populated with interesting information about DWF and DWFx objects by our design applications - changed between Autodesk Design Review 2008 and 2009. The approach needed in ADR 2009 has now been demonstrated in a sample provided with this post on Volker's Beyond the Paper blog. Read more →

A couple of interesting posts

A couple of posts on other blogs that may be of interest to this blog's readership: CAB Files Present vs. CAB Files Future: over on Beyond the Paper, Volker Joseph raises the possibility of Autodesk Design Review moving from a simple CAB distribution model to one which would allow installation of pre-requisite modules (presumably such as the .NET Framework), which would result in a larger distribution. If you have an opinion - one way or another - on this topic, please post a comment on Volker's blog. Autodesk Developer Network (ADN): Support and Expertise from Concept to Market: over... Read more →

Freewheel fun

I'm currently working on the handouts for my AU classes: two are sessions I delivered last year, so much of the work for those has been to go through make sure everything works on the latest product versions (and to update the screenshots, as they do look much nicer now that I'm running Vista, it has to be said :-). As part of the update process for my "Enrich your DWF" session I've been looking at the new capabilities of the Project Freewheel API. The best way to see the capabilities of the new Javascript API to Project Freewheel... Read more →

DWF Toolkit 7.5 available

Over on Beyond the Paper, Volker Joseph has just announced the availability of the latest version of the DWF Toolkit, which - excitingly to me, at least - supports the XPS-compatible DWFx format. Read more →

Autodesk Design Review 2009 API documentation now available

Those of you developing with Autodesk Design Review will be happy to find out that the ADR API documentation for the 2009 release is now available on Beyond the Paper. Enjoy! Read more →

API overhaul for Autodesk Design Review

My old friend Volker Joseph, over on Beyond the Paper, wrote recently about a planned overhaul of the Autodesk Design Review API. If you currently use the ADR API, please be sure to check the list of interfaces that are slated for removal and let Volker know of any you consider important. Thanks! Read more →

Using AJAX to generate pages hosting Freewheel views

I touched on this subject a few weeks ago in part 2 of my DWF-related AU handout, but thought I'd come back and describe in more depth some of the fun (although a more accurate word might be "difficulty" :-) I had solving this problem. I've been playing around with web services and XML since SaaS was still known as ASP, and have tried to stay up-to-date with the technology as best I can. I'm really a client-side programmer, all things considered: I've created some server-side code, but have mostly involved myself with desktop-oriented programming and creation of samples... Read more →

AU Handouts: Enriching Your DWF™ - Part 2

[This post continues from part 1 of this series. The source for the below applications is available here: DWF Toolkit application source, Design Review application source & Freewheel application source.] Mining the data with the DWF Toolkit Now we’re going to look at using the DWF Toolkit – the freely available, cross platform toolkit for creating and reading DWF files – to extract the “identity” and “material” metadata associated with our geometry. The DWF Toolkit is a C++ toolkit, so we have two components to our project: A C++ DLL that uses the DWF Toolkit to read a DWF,... Read more →

AU Handouts: Enriching Your DWF™ - Part 1

Introduction This session focuses on technologies that can be used to view and access DWF content downstream from Autodesk’s design products. Yesterday’s session focused on DWG – we’re going to take the model containing 3D solids that we created during that session and publish it to DWF, adding custom metadata. We can then look at how to harness this data in lightweight applications, whether to access it non-graphically or to view it. Firstly, why are we using 3D solids in this example? The choice was somewhat arbitrary – the point is really to demonstrate the ability to access properties... Read more →

Automating batch printing of DWF files using Design Review 2008

We sometimes receive questions on how best to automate the printing of DWF files. Autodesk Design Review 2008 now has a new Batch Print Plug-in enabling just this. Once you've installed the plug-in, you'll be able to use the Batch Print Wizard in Design Review (on the file menu, once a DWF has been loaded). This Wizard allows you to configure a batch job for Design Review to process and save it to a BPJ (Batch Print Job) file. This BPJ (which is basically a very simple XML file) can then be used to drive the batch print process... Read more →

Recorded presentation on Autodesk's Component Technologies

It's been quite a week... I was attending Autodesk's annual One Team Conference in Las Vegas, and had a number of meetings before, during and afterwards (hence my inability to make any posts whatsoever since Sunday). It was hectic, but a great event - the highlight for me was the keynote address on Wednesday by none other that Bill Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States! Wow. Anyway, late last week it came to my attention that a presentation of mine had made it onto one of Autodesk's public websites. Thanks to posts on Jimmy Bergmark's and Scott... Read more →

DWFx & Freewheel

Many of you will have seen the recent announcement from Autodesk and Microsoft regarding DWFx. I thought I’d spend some time talking about the technology behind the announcement and the impact on developers using DWF. I also wanted to mention Project Freewheel briefly once again. DWFx Here are the recent DWFx-related announcements, from Scott Sheppard’s Beyond the Paper blog: PRESS RELEASE: Autodesk Unlocks Design Data for Windows Vista and XPS Users AU Update: Microsoft Announces Support for DWF via XPS Microsoft .NET 3.0 Framework includes DWF (.dwfx) Viewing Capability I’ve put the below information in a Q&A format (which... Read more →

Calling the DWFRender Web Service from HTML

I decided to go ahead and put a test page together for the DWFRender Web Service. It still wasn't feasible to make it part of the blog itself, given the issues with scripting, particularly, but I've included the files here for you to download and run locally: Download freewheel_web_service_test.zip There are three web methods called by this code: pdkVersion - gets the version of the PDK on the server (a string value) pageCount - gets the number of pages for a particular DWF file (an integer value) load - gets more detailed information about each page in a DWF... Read more →

Project Freewheel: Losing Control!

Project Freewheel is a project that was recently launched via Autodesk Labs. It's a technology preview that allows you to share DWF files without the need for installing a client application that includes an ActiveX control for DWF display (such as the DWF Viewer or Design Review). There are three main features of Project Freewheel that are of interest to developers. Let's take a look at them below. Embedding a navigable DWF It's now really simple to embed a DWF file in your web page without forcing a download of the DWF Viewer application. As long as your DWF... Read more →

Linking 2D and 3D with the DWF Viewer 7 API

I haven't written about the API capabilities of the DWF Viewer, as yet, but this is a technology I really enjoy working with. The latest release (version 7), especially, has some really cool API capabilities: while you've been able to respond to selection events in 2D views for some time, it's now also possible to manipulate 3D views, selecting which objects should be displayed. If you throw in the capabilities of AutoCAD's DWF Metadata API (which allows you to add in custom metadata into both 2D and 3D DWF sheets, as they're being published) you really get some interesting... Read more →

Webcast in the making

I thought I’d mention one of the projects we’re working on in DevTech right now. We’re planning a webcast for later this year, to talk our developers through the various technologies Autodesk provides to create/access/view native DWG data and published DWF data. Here’s the idea: we show the generation of native DWG data using AutoCAD 2007 (in this case creating a number of 3D solids). We then take show how various technologies can be used to make use of the information stored in the native DWG file. Afterwards, we’ll publish the data to DWF – showing the capacity to... Read more →