Through the Interface

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 →

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 →

Signing your application modules for AutoCAD 2016 – Part 1

This series of posts is one I’ve been meaning to write since AutoCAD 2016 started shipping. Thankfully a number of other people have filled the void, in the meantime, so I’ve created an appendix of related posts that you can find at the bottom of each post in this series. The series is about how we’re working to improve security inside AutoCAD, and what this means for application developers. Dieter’s posts on Lynn’s blog help explain some of the background to this work, much as I’ve posted here in the past, too. Perhaps the biggest security change in AutoCAD... Read more →

AutoCAD 2015: calling commands

photo credit: Marcin Wichary via photopin cc As mentioned in the last post, fibers are now inactive in AutoCAD 2015 (the code paths are still there, largely for testing purposes, but should not need to be enabled for typical usage of the product). Fibers were a technology that Microsoft introduced way back when to help single document (and typically single-threaded) applications adapt more easily to the brave new world of MDI. At least that’s my recollection and understanding. They were basically a mechanism by which applications such as AutoCAD could manage their per-document state, making the relevant data current... Read more →

AutoCAD Developer Documentation Survey

Viru Aithal from the ADN team posted a link to this survey on the ADN DevBlog and asked that I post it here, too. The survey will help us determine your priorities for developer-oriented documentation, so we definitely appreciate the time you take to fill it out. [You might even find out about documentation resources of which you were previously unaware – there’s quite a list in there.] My inbox is nearly back under control after my week of holiday, so I’ll certainly be posting more during the course of the week. photo credit: splorp via photopin cc Read more →

Service Pack 1 for AutoCAD 2013

As reported by Tom Stoeckel over on Without a Net, AutoCAD 2013 Service Pack 1 is now available for download. I’ve been waiting for this release with some impatience… in my new role I’ve been increasingly involved in discussions around the security of AutoCAD and our customers’ data, and this Service Pack makes significant progress in this area. As Tom notes, malware attacks in AutoCAD typically† take advantage of the fact that when a drawing is loaded, AutoCAD tries automatically to load various types of acad.* files (acad.dvb, acad.lsp, acad.fas, acad.vlx, …) from the drawing’s folder. Which means that... Read more →

There’s still time to fill out the 2010 API wishlist surveys

As mentioned in this previous post, the following API wishlist surveys are currently live: AutoCAD® AutoCAD® Civil 3D® AutoCAD® Map 3D® Revit® Autodesk Inventor® Autodesk Navisworks® We’ve had around 500 responses across the various surveys, but to give a few more people the chance to respond, we’ve extended the deadline until June 11th, 2010. To give you an idea of how the voting is looking so far, here’s a summary of the responses against the survey’s “money” question (5. From the following list of possible AutoCAD API enhancements, please choose three areas that you recommend we make our top... Read more →

More translated AutoCAD VBA to VB.NET Migration DevTVs

In this previous post I mentioned a couple of additional translations of the VBA migration DevTV that were in progress. Here is an updated list of the various ones we now have available, including links to German, Spanish and Japanese versions: English view download (44.7 MB) Chinese view download (88.9 MB) French view download (39 MB) Portuguese view download (80.3 MB) Russian view download (39.3 MB) German view download (42.4 MB) Spanish view download (52.9 MB) Japanese MP4 download (66.9 MB) WMV download (78.5 MB) A big thanks to Augusto Gonçalves, Jeremy Tammik, Shigekazu Saito and Katsuaki Takamizawa for... Read more →

Translated AutoCAD VBA to VB.NET Migration DevTVs

To help people who don’t master English with their efforts to migrate their code from VBA to VB.NET, my team has been busy translating our existing AutoCAD VBA to VB.NET Migration Basics DevTV session into other languages. Here are the languages we have, so far (including an updated English version): English view download (44.7 MB) Chinese view download (88.9 MB) French view download (39 MB) Portuguese view download (80.3 MB) Russian view download (39.3 MB) A big thanks to Augusto Gonçalves, Xiaodong Liang, Philippe Leefsma and Marat Mirgaleev for their hard work on these sessions. German and Spanish versions... Read more →

Handling COM calls rejected by AutoCAD from an external .NET application

We’ve had a few reports from people implementing external .NET applications to drive AutoCAD – as shown in this previous post – experiencing intermittent failures once AutoCAD 2010 Update 1 has been applied. Here’s a typical error message: It contains the text “Problem executing component: Call was rejected by callee. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80010001 (RPC_E_CALL_REJECTED))” (to help people Googling this error message :-). This “problem” was introduced as we addressed an issue with the way our WPF components in AutoCAD handle inbound messages, largely due to Microsoft’s decision not to support nested message loops in WPF. If WPF is... Read more →

Updated DevTV: AutoCAD VBA to VB.NET Migration Basics

After one update to the content he originally posted, Stephen Preston has handed the reigns for this DevTV across to Augusto Gonçalves, a São Paulo-based member of our DevTech Americas team. Augusto presented his work to rave reviews at AU 2009, and has now updated the online DevTV content. I’ve gone ahead and updated the original post to point to this new content, but here are the links, for your convenience: AutoCAD VBA to VB.NET Migration Basics view download (44.7 Mb) Aside from upgrading the presenter (sorry, Stephen – I couldn’t resist ;-) we’ve made some additional enhancements in... Read more →

Testing truth

This is a minor pet peeve of mine that I felt like sharing. Feel free to post a comment if you agree, disagree or have your own pet coding peeve to share with other readers of this blog. I quite often see .NET code that tests for the value of a Boolean to see whether it’s true or false: if (booleanVariable == true) { … } or If isBooleanFunction() = False Then … End If Now while not strictly incorrect, this style is, at least, redundant: a Boolean is by nature true or false, and testing for equality with... Read more →

AU 2009 classes, both physical and virtual

As mentioned in this previous post, at this year’s Autodesk University the “Developer Track” has rightly been combined with the “Customization & Programming” track (it made sense to rationalise these two tracks which had a very similar style of class). So unlike in previous years, the sessions we’re either presenting or helping coordinate are listed with the “CP” prefix. Here’s a quick round-up of the AutoCAD-related physical classes, labs and panel sessions being presented either by my team or by members of Engineering (with my team helping coordinate): CP104-1 Using .NET 4.0 with AutoCAD Albert Szilvasy CP308-4 AutoCAD VBA... Read more →

Free webcast on AutoCAD VBA to .NET Migration

Sorry for the late notice on this one… I’d have posted sooner but for having taken some time off, last week, to take the family to Disneyland Paris. Now I just need a few more days of vacation to recover. :-S :-) Tomorrow there’s a free webcast showing how to migrate your VBA code to use VBA.NET. The content focuses primarily on the use of COM Interop to quickly get your VBA code working from VB.NET, building on the DevTV session mentioned previously and using its accompanying migration tool. The session will be taking place at 8am Pacific/10am Eastern/4pm... Read more →

DevLabs in Beijing, Bangalore & Las Vegas(?)

This post is to bring you up-to-date on DevLabs, an initiative I’ve mentioned a couple of times in recent months. We’ve so far held two very successful DevLab events in Farnborough and San Francisco. The feedback we’ve received from attendees has been overwhelming positive, and the people from my team who hosted the events found the experience extremely rewarding. So yes, full speed ahead with the remaining, scheduled DevLabs events in China and India: Beijing, China August 17-21, AutoCAD and Autodesk Inventor APIs August 24-28, Geospatial and Revit APIs Bangalore, India September 8–11, Geospatial and Revit APIs September 14-17,... Read more →

Converting between C# and VB.NET

While I’m a huge fan of learning and using different programming languages – whether to train your brain to consider different potential solutions to a problem or to improve your job security and your ability to roll with the punches as the employment & technology landscapes shift – you will no doubt have noticed that the vast majority of my posts contain C# code. A lot of my early programming (both work and fun) was in BASIC (whether BBC BASIC, Level II BASIC on the TRS-80 or GW-BASIC) and some of the more involved internal projects I’ve worked on... Read more →

Updated DevTV: AutoCAD VBA to .NET Migration Basics

Stephen Preston has updated his “AutoCAD VBA to .NET Migration Basics” DevTV session. I’ve updated the links in this previous post to point to the updated DevTV, as the original recording is likely to disappear during the coming days. Here’s an update from Stephen on what’s new in this version: New features of the migration tool: Automatically adds ‘ObjectDBX’ Type Library to created VB6 project file to ensure Autodesk.AutoCAD.Interop.Common classes are correctly identified (previously these came in as Autodesk.AutoCAD.Interop) Extra functionality to post-process your VB Express project for you: - Adds F5 startup application - Adds references to acmgd... Read more →

DevTV: AutoCAD VBA to .NET Migration Basics

As mentioned in a comment on a recent post, Stephen Preston, our DevTech Americas Manager, has put together a useful tool and accompanying DevTV session to help people migrate their VBA code to VB.NET. The resultant code uses COM Interop to call into AutoCAD. AutoCAD VBA to .NET Migration Basics view download (44.3 Mb) Stephen considers this presentation, and the migration tool itself, to be in draft form. If you have feedback, please do send Stephen an email. Read more →

Metaprogramming with AutoCAD - Part 1

A recent comment on one of my F# articles got me thinking about this topic (thanks, Thomas! :-), so I thought I’d write a few posts on it. Next week is AU, and the week after that I’m attending a training class in Boston, so posts may be a little sparse over the coming weeks. Metaprogramming – according to the definition on Wikipedia – is the act of writing code that writes or manipulates other programs (or itself). But what is it really all about? The vast majority of programmers are actually metaprogramming without realizing it has such a... Read more →

Protecting intellectual property in AutoCAD application modules

This is an interesting topic – and one that I’m far from being expert in – so it would be great if readers could submit comments with additional information. Intellectual property protection is a major concern for software developers, and issues that are seen today with .NET languages have been troubling AutoCAD developers since the introduction of AutoLISP. So, what are these issues? As a professional software developer, if you ship source-code to your customers there is substantial risk of it being borrowed or stolen for use in other unlicensed situations. This is true if you ship the actual... Read more →