Through the Interface

Enabling Visual Studio Code’s integrated web debugging

Yesterday I finally took the time to work on one of those tasks that had previously never quite bubbled up to the top of my priority list. Since I’ve been working on Dasher 360 I’ve put up with using the developer tools built into Chrome for debugging. While these are pretty good – especially with source-map support, allowing us to debug the source TypeScript code – which is the main reason I haven’t taken the time to do otherwise, they do have their limitations: just for instance, you very often start to edit code in the debugger before realising... Read more →

Sharing a hologram between multiple HoloLens devices – Part 1

I’ve been starting to work on extending the “Dancing Robot” HoloLens project to have a shared hologram: basically to have the position changes shared between devices, as well as the angles and speeds of the various parts of the robot arm. There’s quite a lot to this. There needs to be a server somewhere that coordinates the messages sent between the various devices. There needs to be a shared concept of space, so that devices that are in the same room but in different locations – which is all of them, at least for the usage scenarios I’m currently... Read more →

Making our HoloLens robot dance!

As promised, way back when we started this series of posts looking at various Windows Holographic platform capabilities to build an app that displays an animated ABB industrial robot inside HoloLens, here’s the part where we make it dance. :-) During Autodesk Switzerland’s 25th anniversary party in late October, people will be able to give the app a try and hopefully see the robot dancing along to whatever tunes the DJ plays. Let’s talk a bit about how the system works… Quite early on I decided against doing the additional audio processing directly on the HoloLens device itself. So... Read more →

Autodesk SoCap

I’m excited to announce the newest member of the Autodesk product portfolio, Autodesk SoCap. The term “SoCap” stands for “Software Capture”, in much the same way as ReCap stands for “Reality Capture”. SoCap is a tool that helps you capture existing software behaviour as code, just as ReCap helps you capture a 3D scene as a point cloud. For SoCap to do its thing, you point it at the piece of software whose behaviour you want to capture – whether desktop software on Windows/Linux/OS X, mobile software targeting iOS/Android* or the URL of a cloud-based app – and SoCap... Read more →

NuGet packages now available for AutoCAD 2016

Some time ago we posted the NuGet packages for AutoCAD 2015’s .NET API. The packages for AutoCAD 2016 are now live, too. Here’s the report from the NuGet console (accessible in Visual Studio via Tools –> NuGet Package Manager –> Package Manager Console). PM> Get-Package -filter AutoCAD.NET -ListAvailable Id Version Description/Release Notes -- ------- ------------------------- AutoCAD.NET 20.1.0 AutoCAD 2016 API AutoCAD.NET.Core 20.1.0 AutoCAD 2016 core object model API AutoCAD.NET.Model 20.1.0 AutoCAD 2016 drawing object model API To install the 2016 versions of the assemblies into your project, you can use the following command, once again in the NuGet Console.... Read more →

AutoCAD 2015 APIs available via NuGet

We’ve received this request a few times in recent years: .NET developers have asked to be able to add dependencies on AutoCAD’s .NET reference assemblies – primarily acmgd.dll, acdbmgd.dll and accoremgd.dll – to their Visual Studio projects using the built-in package management tool, NuGet. For those of you unfamiliar with NuGet, it’s well worth checking out: it’s a really nice way to manage library dependencies in your .NET projects. Well, Christmas has come a few weeks early: the AutoCAD team has posted the 2015 .NET reference assemblies to NuGet. This is interesting to .NET developers for a number of... Read more →

VS2012 debugger type visualizers for ObjectARX

The C++ developers among you may remember the autoexp.dat file, which tells older versions of Visua... Read more →

An updated implementation of a CAD standards plugin for AutoCAD using .NET

Over the last few months I’ve had a number of people ask me for an update to this 6-year old post on implementing a CAD standards plugin for AutoCAD (which in turn was based on code from an older DevNote created from a much older VB6 sample). Augusto Gonçalves from the ADN team very kindly made a start on this while I was out on vacation, providing a basic port that I’ve now just put a few finishing touches on. Very few changes were actually needed from the code in the original post, thankfully. Also, I did do my... Read more →

Debugging AutoCAD using Visual Studio 2013

There are lots of reasons to want to use the newly-released Visual Studio 2013 to develop and debug .NET modules for AutoCAD. One of the main ones is the long-awaited addition of Edit & Continue support for 64-bit applications. Unfortunately in this post we’ll see why, despite the wait, E&C isn’t going to work when debugging 64-bit .NET modules inside AutoCAD. The primary issue when running AutoCAD from the VS2013 debugger manifests itself in issues with font loading. If you launch AutoCAD from VS2013 to debug a 64-bit class library – even without actually loading the module – then... Read more →

Jigging an AutoCAD circle from a JavaScript-defined command

Just to complement yesterday’s post showing how to define a simple jig using JavaScript, here’s the same code from a separate .js file: var doc = Acad.Application.activedocument; var center = new Acad.Point3d(0, 0, 0); var radius = 0; var trId; function pointToString(pt) { var ret = pt.x.toString() + "," + pt.y.toString() + "," + pt.z.toString(); return ret; } function createCircle(cen, rad, first) { // Build an XML string containing data to create // an AcGiTransient that represents the circle var cursor = ''; var drawable = '' + 'Read more →

Blinking lights with a Netduino Plus 2

After blinking LEDs with an Arduino Uno R3 and its younger step-sibling the Digispark, I decided to give the same treatment to their beef-cake second cousin, the Netduino Plus 2. James Maeding had been telling me to take a look at the Netduino for ages, so when I ordered some parts for my (optimistically speaking) forthcoming Kinect for ZX Spectrum integration, I decided to throw in a Netduino Plus 2. Now the Netduino Plus 2 retails for $60 in the US (and 80CHF here in Switzerland, as the device is assembled in the US), which means it’s at least... Read more →

Inaugural Zurich .NET Developer meet-up

I headed cross to the Zurich area on Tuesday afternoon – which is quite a trek from where I live, around ~2.5 hours by train – to attend the first Zurich .NET Developer meet-up. The event was held in the Microsoft office in Wallisellen: they kindly provided beer and the meeting room, while the session itself was organised by members of the local .NET community. Considering the weather – a pretty serious snowstorm hit the country that day – the event was surprisingly well attended. The main topic of the session was MVVM Light, a lightweight framework developed by... Read more →

The latest on Windows Azure

A few things have happened over the last week or so that have got me looking, once again, at Windows Azure: Firstly, there was an exciting release announced last week (I attended the webcast online from San Francisco, where the event happened to be taking place), prior to this week’s TechEd. Among the key features were: Support for Linux instances These will presumably be cheaper, given the lack of OS licensing costs Virtual Machine capability IaaS for those that prefer it over PaaS (something no doubt learned from the popularity of AWS) Select from the online Image Gallery or... Read more →

The new developer experience in Visual Studio 11

I'm sure several of you have formed opinions on the new look & feel of the Visual Studio 11 Beta, whether you've installed it on your existing OS or have tried it on one of the preview versions of Windows 8 (or perhaps you’ve just seen screenshots on the web). I've been using it now for a couple of weeks – on and off, admittedly – and have mixed feelings about the new monochrome styling. A lot of people have stronger views (which is basically a polite way of saying it’s fairly universally hated, judging from the feedback). I... Read more →

A simple MRU browser for AutoCAD data using WinRT

As promised in my last post, I spent some time hacking together a basic application to get a feel for what it’s like to develop inside the WinRT sandbox for Windows 8. If you’re interested in the source code, here it is. Be warned: the code is really just to prove a concept – there’s a lot therein I’d consider sub-optimal for a production application. If you’re more interested in seeing the application in action, but haven’t yet installed the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, then here’s a quick screencast I recorded: A few comments on the experience of developing... Read more →

Attended the Windows 8 TechConference

I’ve just arrived home from a long day (mainly because of the 4-hour round-trip rail travel) at the Windows TechConference in Baden, Switzerland, focused on Windows 8. It was a pretty interesting day – thankfully, as I’m still a bit jetlagged from my trip to California, and I didn’t want to doze off in the lecture theatre. And yes, I’ve certainly dozed during a few lectures in my time, but not since leaving University. The main developer-oriented session I attended – which covered writing a WinRT application to pull down Teletext into a XAML + C# application, which was... Read more →

Copying & pasting code from this blog into Visual Studio

I’ve been meaning to post on this topic for some time, and a recent comment reminded me to do so. As many of you will have noticed, when you do a straight copy & paste of code from this blog into Visual Studio, it comes with unwanted line feeds. For instance, taking some recently posted code using Internet Explorer 9: And pasting it into VS2010 results in unwanted linefeeds in the code: Less than ideal, to say the least. The reason this happens is probably the way the HTML gets formatted by the CopySourceAsHtml tool I use to get... Read more →

No source available when debugging an AutoCAD plug-in

Given the fact AU 2011 is quickly approaching, I decided it was time to dust off my Kinect-related code and getting it working with the Beta SDK from Microsoft Research. Part of the reason I haven’t been able to do this sooner is that my primary work machine is currently a MacBook Pro running Windows 7 via Parallels, and the Microsoft Kinect driver currently does not support working inside a Virtual Machine. I did start to try to get my previous implementation using OpenNI + NITE to work on this system, but as it uses the nKinect component that... Read more →

Debugging AutoCAD .NET projects using Express Editions

Visual C# Express and Visual Basic Express can be used successfully to build .NET applications for AutoCAD: in fact many developers use these tools to do so. One long-standing issue with using these tools with AutoCAD relates to debugging: the ability to debug using an external application is not directly exposed via the user interface Visual C#/Basic Express, which – as AutoCAD implements a plug-in hosting framework for .NET Class Libraries (or DLLs) – makes life complicated. The workaround for addressing this issue has been documented in this previous post and also on the ADN web-site, but thankfully this... Read more →

Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 – Part 2

After creating our basic LightSwitch project in the last post, today we’re going to add some real functionality. To get warmed up, let’s take a look at some contents of the project we created last time. At the top level, we see there’s a new project type, along with some intriguing files: Drilling down a level further, we see a number of sub-projects (Client, Server, Common) contain C# files: None of this should need to be edited manually, of course. Before adding some real capability to our app, let’s take a quick look at the data-type imported when we... Read more →