Through the Interface

Autodesk Exchange: preparing your AutoCAD application for posting

Back when we were first creating the Exchange Store, I went through the process of preparing several of our Plugins of the Month for posting to Autodesk Exchange. After a break of several months, I’ve now gone back and readied September’s plugin (TransTips, now on Autodesk Labs) for posting, also. It seemed to make sense to spend a couple of posts documenting the process I followed – which should complement the DevTV sessions already posted on the Autodesk Exchange Apps Developer Center: Autodesk Exchange Apps User Experience Autoloader Format Explained Creating a Partial CUI This initial post focuses on... Read more →

September’s Plugin of the Month live on Autodesk Labs: TransTips

Regular readers of this blog may have followed the development of this plugin, but I’ve written this post is to announce its availability more officially (in addition to Scott’s post from last week). TransTips uses the Bing Translator web service to translate tooltips into one of 36 languages on-the-fly, as they are displayed by AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, 3ds Max and the products based upon them. The 36 languages are those currently supported by the Bing Translator service: Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian,... Read more →

Taking a REST

Actually, I wish that were true. I’m planning on taking some time off in October, but that seems a long way off, at this stage. What I’ve actually been doing is working with some REST-based APIs: firstly, I’ve been finishing up work on September’s Plugin of the Month, TransTips for AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor, & 3ds Max (to be posted on Autodesk Labs in the next few days). TransTips makes use of the REST API for Bing Translator, to automatically translate tooltips in various products. Secondly, perhaps more excitingly, I’ve been coding against a possible future web service API for... Read more →

A guide-line for Visual Studio

And yes, I do mean that literally. :-) Since starting this blog, 5 years ago – and even more in the last 2 years, since starting to develop and edit our Plugins of the Month for Autodesk Labs – I’ve been checking every line of code I’ve written to make sure it doesn’t exceed 70 characters in length (the magic number for fitting my blog’s width). It’s become close to automatic – in the sense I rarely write lines that exceed this length and therefore need adjusting – but the process I use is still quite manual: I check... Read more →

Companion apps now available in AutoCAD 2012

Today is a holiday, here in Switzerland, and I suffered a PC failure late last week, so I'm writing this without access to my usual system resources (AutoCAD 2012 and Visual Studio 2010, for instance). Despite these minor complications, I did want to let you know about this very important announcement. The introduction of the companion apps via the Autodesk Exchange Apps tab inside AutoCAD 2012 - a mechanism introducing AutoCAD's extensive customer base to the value of applications from AutoCAD developers - could well turn out to be a watershed moment in the history of AutoCAD, comparable to... Read more →

Creating the smallest possible circle around 2D AutoCAD geometry using .NET

Now it’s time to shed some light on the reason for the code in the last post. I wrote it to help address a question that came in from Elson Brown via our Plugin of the Month feedback alias: I have a request for an app that will draw the smallest circle around a polyline object. Pick the polyline and the app draws the smallest possible circle around the shape. It turns out this is a well-known problem (and thanks to Stephen Preston for pointing me in this direction), commonly known as the minimal enclosing circle or smallest circle... Read more →

February’s Plugin of the Month live on Autodesk Labs: AveragePoint for AutoCAD

Another month, another plugin. :-) As announced over on Scott’s blog a few days ago, the latest Plugin of the Month is now live. It’s based on the code in this previous post, the only change being how the average point gets returned to AutoCAD’s command-line: we now send it as a string that gets interpreted as a LISP point, rather than straight, comma-delimited decimals, because a) it reduces my concerns about working on different locales and b) AutoCAD deals with the points in this format much more nicely if the command is called non-transparently. Thanks to those who... Read more →

Customizing ScriptPro 2.0 to process drawings not present in the AutoCAD editor

It’s time to wrap up the series on batch-reporting Registered Application IDs. For reference, here’s how we got to where we are today: Implement a command to collect RegAppId information for the active document Extend this command to work on a drawing not loaded in the editor Save our RegAppId information to some persistent location (XML) Transform the resulting XML file to HTML using XSLT Create a modified version of ScriptPro 2.0 (one of our Plugins of the Month) to call our command without opening the drawing The broader point of today’s post – other than simply to deliver... Read more →

Counting the RegAppIds for the active AutoCAD drawing and its external references using .NET

Many of you will be aware of what has been referred to as the “RegAppId virus”: drawings that have been unfortunately polluted with excessive Registered Application IDs – which are used by applications to attach XData to entities – have these RegAppIds brought into a main drawing when Xrefed, duplicating and duplicating IDs that were often redundant in the first place. In fact – back in the day – I remember a very popular 3rd party application (which has long since been fixed and shall remain nameless) that erroneously used to create hundreds (if not thousands) of these IDs... Read more →

Returning an average point to the AutoCAD command-line using .NET

This request came in over the weekend: There is a useful object snap in AutoCAD for the mid point of 2 selected points. I would like a midpoint (average) of 3 (or more) points. Could this work in 3D as well as 2D? It’s useful when drawing building surveys, often you triangulate a point from several and there are often ‘minimal’ differences in the dimension and you just take the average. Given the fact we’re actually talking about an arbitrary number of points that will almost certainly not belong to a single entity, object snaps are probably neither the... Read more →

A couple of streamlined solutions for AutoCAD using LINQ

I owe Chris Kratz a huge thanks for inspiring me to do more with LINQ. This post uses LINQ to provide more elegant solutions to a couple of problems described in previous posts. The code in today’s post is probably my second brief foray into the world of LINQ. The comments Chris posted on the last post prompted me to spend a little time looking at LINQ over the weekend, and I really like it. I’d heard before that “LINQ is really just functional programming”, and in many ways I see that more clearly now, myself: the set of... Read more →

January’s Plugin of the Month live on Autodesk Labs: DrawOrder By Layer for AutoCAD

As Scott has announced over on his blog, January’s Plugin of the Month, DrawOrder By Layer, is now available on Autodesk Labs. I first posted the code for this very useful plugin back in October, and this version includes only a very minor change from that one (for performance reasons it now only works with modelspace layers). A huge thanks to Terry Dotson from DotSoft for generously donating this plugin. After the original post, a few people provided feedback on user interface enhancements they’d like to see in the tool – thanks for taking the time to do so,... Read more →

Some content from AU 2010

As many of you may now be aware, much of the content recorded at this year’s Autodesk University is now available on the AU website. You’ll find the recording of my AU Virtual session, “Getting to Know the AutoCAD® Plug-ins of the Month”, as well as material from the two physical sessions I presented, “Point Clouds on a Shoestring” and “Integrate F# into Your C# or VB.NET Application for an 8x Performance Boost”. In fact, much to my surprise, the “Point Clouds on a Shoestring” session (which turned out to be my highest-rated session) ended up being recorded, and... Read more →

December’s Plugin of the Month live on Autodesk Labs: QR Codes for AutoCAD

As promised and reported on, and then announced by Scott on his blog, the QR Codes application for AutoCAD is now live on Autodesk Labs as December’s Plugin of the Month. You may have seen my original implementation, but it’s come a long way thanks to the efforts of Augusto Gonçalves, a member of DevTech based in São Paulo. While I had developed the original implementation to create and embed raster images using the Google Chart API, Augusto extended that implementation to create native hatches for QR Codes. And while my implementation focused on a command-line UI, Augusto implemented... Read more →

At AU 2010

It was a bit of a schlep, but I got here. My flight out of Geneva was delayed due to inclement weather: the first (actually quite mild) snowstorm of the season. The runway was closed for some time and there was a 1+-hour backlog on de-icing, so I sat helplessly watching my connection time in Heathrow dissipate to nothing. In the end, after a 3-hour delay, this initial flight arrived 5 minutes after my direct connection to Las Vegas had left. I had the choice of waiting a full 24-hours – as BA fly once a day direct to... Read more →

AU 2010 Handout: Integrate F# into Your C# or VB.NET Application for an 8x Performance Boost

This handout is for the companion class to the one whose handout formed my last post. While that class was user-focused, this one, “CP322-2 - Integrate F# into Your C# or VB.NET Application for an 8x Performance Boost”, is more developer-focused and takes the hood off the implementation of the BrowsePhotosynth application. The code for this special version of the application – which imports synchronously via C# and synchronously/asynchronously via F# – is available here for download. Introduction This class takes a look at the implementation of BrowsePhotosynth for AutoCAD, the ADN Plugin of the Month from October 2010... Read more →

Two minor fixes to Clipboard Manager and much data-bound frustration

I spent more time than I wanted tunneling down a rabbit-hole, today. Thankfully I really didn’t have a great deal of time to focus on the problem at hand, otherwise I might have spent even more time down there. But perhaps the time wasn’t all wasted – at least I’ve made a blog post out of it, even if it’s mainly to vent my frustration. :-) I started – on a positive note – by fixing the focus issues when certain uses of the Clipboard Manager result in AutoCAD not having focus (presumably the palette has it, instead): P/Invoking... Read more →

Exporting to DWG from the Clipboard Manager

I’ve made a couple of updates to the Clipboard Manager in this latest version. Firstly I wanted to remove a peculiar situation that occurred in the previous versions when you copy something to the clipboard that isn’t AutoCAD geometry: for some reason this act invalidates the ability to access data – such as the preview images – from the items in the Clipboard Manager. The pasting into the drawing still works, as setting an AutoCAD object back onto the clipboard re-enables access to AutoCAD data. You can try this with the previous version by creating a number of entries... Read more →

November’s Plugin of the Month live on Autodesk Labs: ScriptPro 2.0 for AutoCAD

As mentioned previously, Viru Aithal, from DevTech India, has been working hard on a replacement for the venerable ScriptPro tool. I’m delighted to say that it’s now ready, and is live on Autodesk Labs as November’s Plugin of the Month. Viru took the codebase he developed for the DWF/PDF Batch Publish tool and created ScriptPro 2.0, written from the ground up in C# and developed without any dependency on a specific AutoCAD version. Viru’s approach uses the equivalent of late binding to call into AutoCAD through COM and so doesn’t require a specific AutoCAD Type Library. Which means the... Read more →

Automatically cropping a bitmap (more quickly)

I mentioned in the last post that I was looking to optimise my approach for automatic cropping of an image. It turns out that using Bitmap.LockBits() and the corresponding UnlockBits() does indeed help, although I haven’t run any actual benchmarks to measure the difference in the two approaches. The disadvantage of this approach is that you’re a bit more down “in the weeds” when it comes to accessing the raw data – you have to support different raw image formats, for instance (and it may well be that I’ve missed some important ones – it’s only really by chance... Read more →