Through the Interface

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 →

Automatically cropping a bitmap (slowly)

I received a few comments by email and otherwise regarding the preview capability added to the Clipboard Manager Plugin of the Month in the last post. Basically it’s useful, but only to a point: the bitmap created on the clipboard is the same size as AutoCAD’s screen, with the copied objects in their location relative to the screen. This means that if you’re working on a drawing like this: And you want to copy the leader to the left of the cursor to the clipboard, the preview you’ll end up with will be something like this: Which – when... Read more →

Updated Clipboard Manager – now with preview!

As mentioned yesterday, I went ahead and integrated previewing into the Clipboard Manager Plugin of the Month. I won’t include the code directly in the post – it’s fundamentally similar in nature to that posted yesterday and is, in any case, included in the project. There were a few additional tricks needed, such as modifying the SplitterDistance property of a SplitContainer to make sure the aspect ratio of the image gets maintained, but nothing particularly earth-shattering. Here’s the updated project – I’ll be looking into the “save between session” feature (which I suspect is going to morph into a... Read more →

Previewing the contents of the clipboard in an AutoCAD palette using .NET

I’ve been meaning to attack this one since we first published the Clipboard Manager as a Plugin of the Month: working out how to display a preview image of the clipboard contents inside the Clipboard Manager palette. And then I happened to receive a request by email, yesterday, suggesting a couple of enhancements to the tool. A nice reminder. :-) 1. Have the clipboard include image previews, similar to that of the wblock command (instead of needing to immediately rename the item when fast copying multiple items). 2. Have the clipboard store items in memory for use in between... Read more →

SortOnVersion & ScriptPro

A friend in our Product Support team in Neuchâtel asked me to help develop a little application to sort drawing files on disk. He has some old Clipper scripts that he used during a previous life as a CAD Manager to sort drawing files into different folders based on their version (held in the first six bytes of the DWG file, as mentioned in this previous post and this post of Shaan’s). We decided I’d implement it in VB.NET, to make it easier for him to understand and extend. The application is simple enough, but could make a mess... Read more →

October’s Plugin of the Month: BrowsePhotosynth for AutoCAD

Many of you will have seen previous incarnations of this tool, during its development. It’s a little more complex than most of our other monthly plugins – mostly as it depends on a couple of external components – but the functionality should hopefully be simple enough to understand and use. I won’t go into great details here, but if you’re using AutoCAD 2011, give it a try by downloading the ZIP from the Autodesk Labs Plugin of the Month site and executing the contained installer package. From there you should be able to run the BROWSEPS command inside AutoCAD... Read more →

Building an Installer – Part 1

It’s been a long time since I’ve dabbled with software deployment technology, which is absolutely fine by me (in my experience installation issues are some of the gnarliest to deal with, so – presumably like the majority of developers, with apologies to Install specialists – I prefer not having to care about them, myself). But last week I had to put together a few installers - as an internal test - for some of our Plugins of the Month, and ended up deciding the process was worth documenting, especially where it relates to the RegDL component I created and... Read more →

More fun with QR Codes: encoding different types of data inside AutoCAD

After a break of a week, I thought it was time to take the QR Code application a little further, after our previous versions creating basic QR codes at a fixed location, using user-specified corners and using a jig. The code in this post adds quite a bit of functionality to the application: The ability to encode various types of data Calendar events Contact information Email addresses Geo-locations Phone numbers Plain text URLs The ability to edit QR Codes The data used to create the QR Code is attached to the raster image as XData and gets used for... Read more →

September’s Plugin of the Month: DigSigStamp

Yesterday Scott Sheppard announced the availability of this plugin over on It’s Alive in the Lab. We originally received a request for this Plugin of the Month some time ago. Fenton Webb, from our DevTech Americas team, developed the initial version using an ObjectARX custom entity – as the requester required support for versions of AutoCAD prior to 2010 – but for this public release, Stephen Preston went ahead and re-implemented the mechanism in a .NET application using the Overrules API introduced in AutoCAD 2010. This plugin basically allows you to see graphically when an AutoCAD drawing is digitally... Read more →

AU 2010 Classes

The class catalogs for AU 2010 – for both the physical and virtual classes – have now been posted to the AU website: I have a few AU classes scheduled – thanks to any of you who took the time to vote for them. My first class is virtual… Getting to Know the AutoCAD® Plugins of the Month (CP212-1V) Tuesday November 30th, 6:00-7:00 am PST Tuesday November 30th, 11:00 am-12:00 pm PST The Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) team has been publishing "Plug-ins of the Month" on Autodesk Labs for over a year. Each of these plug-ins extends an Autodesk®... Read more →

Capturing a point cloud of a monument using Photosynth

A couple of weekends ago, shortly after returning from our trip to the States, I walked down to the area of Lake Neuchâtel that’s nearest our house, called La Tène (which is now also the name of our local commune (or municipality), which was recently created as a result of fusing Marin-Epagnier with Thielle-Wavre… thankfully they didn’t call it Marin-Epagnier-Thielle-Wavre ;-). On the way I stopped off to take a few photos of a local monument. La Tène culture is apparently quite famous in archeological circles, and the monument itself is pretty cool. It’s a replica of an Iron... Read more →

August’s Plugin of the Month: RefUcsSpy for AutoCAD

Just a quick note to say Glenn Ryan’s latest contribution, RefUcsSpy, is now live as August’s Plugin of the Month. I posted a preview of the application a few weeks ago, and you can now get the compiled plugin with complete source project from the Plugin of the Month page on Autodesk Labs. Thanks, Glenn! :-) You’ll note the posted plugin only claims support for AutoCAD 2009 onwards. This is because it relies on the Task Dialog implementation introduced in that version of AutoCAD. If you would like to get it working for prior versions of AutoCAD, you’ll find... Read more →

Preview of August’s Plugin of the Month: RefUcsSpy

AutoCAD users who work with multiple reference files – whether DWG, DWF, DGN, PDF, PCG files or raster images – usually want them to be oriented in space (and to overlay) properly. One common way to make this happen is to set the various files up in world coordinates and then attach them at the origin of the referencing drawing’s WCS. A common issue related to this approach is if the user happens to be in a local UCS: the file will get attached relative to that UCS rather than to the WCS. Glenn Ryan, who generously provided April’s... Read more →

Future Plugin of the Month to embed QR Codes in AutoCAD drawings?

I’ve been having a fun discussion with Augusto Gonçalves, based in São Paulo working for our DevTech Americas team, on the subject of QR Codes. Augusto’s a technology junky – like many members of DevTech – and has been playing around decoding QR Codes with his mobile phone. QR (from “Quick Response”) Codes are two-dimensional bar codes which encode data for later decoding using – ve ry often, at least – some kind of handheld, mobile device. The most common reader applications use your device’s camera to detect and analyse the composition of the QR Code, providing you with... Read more →

Changing the layer of an entity in an AutoCAD block using .NET

After seeing Shaan list the results of the latest AUGI wishlist, I started thinking about which of the items would be worth covering either on this blog or via a Plugin of the Month. The second item on the list, “Automatically Differentiate Manually Edited Dimensions”, has (hopefully) been addressed by Dimension Patrol, this month’s Plugin of the Month, so that’s a good start, anyway. The first item, “Change Objects in a Block to a new Layer”, seemed as good a good place to start as anywhere. Here’s some C# code that builds upon a technique for selecting/highlighting nested entities... Read more →

June’s Plugin of the Month: Dimension Patrol

Thanks again to Stephen Preston, our DevTech Americas Manager, for developing this very useful little utility. You can find an earlier version of this code – which I’d converted to C# and extended to cover text entities – in this previous post. June’s Plugin of the Month is now live: Dimension Patrol for AutoCAD. This one was kicked off by a suggestion from Shaan Hurley: a tool for designers and CAD Managers to quickly check drawings for dimensions with overridden text (which, logically enough, could mean the dimensions no longer accurately reflect their associated distance or value). Sometimes the... Read more →

April's plugin of the Month: XrefStates for AutoCAD

Yes, I know, I know – we’re halfway through the month, already. This plugin has been live on Autodesk Labs since the beginning of the month, but I’ve been a little distracted by April Fools’ jokes, fooling around with Photosynth point clouds as well as finishing up some internal activities which always tend to take time away from blogging at this time of year. Anyway, I’ve been remiss talking about this very cool application, but at least Scott was there to announce it on day one. The application was developed by Glenn Ryan, and there are a number of... Read more →

Plugin of the Month featured in the March/April edition of AUGIWorld

The latest edition of AUGIWorld, the official magazine of AUGI (the Autodesk User Group International), has an article (written by me, which does indeed make this a shameless plug :-) on our Plugin of the Month initiative. Thanks to Mark Kiker and Marilyn Law for helping make this happen; it’s great to get the word out to more people who’ll benefit from these utilities. Read more →

March’s Plugin of the Month live on Autodesk Labs: Batch Publish for AutoCAD

I’m very pleased to announce the availability of this really interesting Plugin of the Month over on Autodesk Labs: Batch Publish for AutoCAD. Here’s an excerpt from the ReadMe (which I happen to have written, but anyway): This plugin can be used with AutoCAD to simplify the process of publishing sets of drawings to DWF and/or PDF. It runs as a command within AutoCAD – as opposed to a separate executable – and uses a separate executable to monitor AutoCAD's health and restart it, as needed. The status of the batch publishing operation is stored to disk, allowing it... Read more →

January’s Plugin of the Month: FacetCurve

Firstly, a slightly belated “Happy New Year!” to all of you. I’m now easing back into the saddle after three very relaxing weeks off with family and friends. One of the first activities I had on my plate in 2010 was to tidy up the application I presented in this previous post and turn it into January’s Plugin of the Month, FacetCurve for AutoCAD. The original C++ application this plugin is based on was generously provided by Jon Smith from COINS, a long-time ADN member (thanks, Jon!). You’ll find the official announcement over on Scott’s blog, in his trademark... Read more →