Through the Interface

Getting Visual Studio a little more cheaply

I don't normally talk about product offers, but then it occurred to me that some readers would find this promotion of interest. Microsoft is making Visual Studio 2008 available to first-time purchasers at the upgrade price, as long as they are using another development tool, including free tools such as Visual Studio Express Editions. It should go without saying that users of previous versions of Visual Studio are also eligible for this price (as long as they are not Visual Studio volume licensees). This means that - as long as you have downloaded and installed an Express version of... Read more →

Pitching .NET to a hardcore C++ developer

This comment came in from a developer on a previous post: We still do all our stuff w/C++/STL/COM/MFC; lots of custom entities and object behavior - for Civil 3D/Land Desktop/Map -- hence, I'm not Dot Netted. The predominate explanation I've heard to move from C++ to .Net is that UI is maybe easier to write...but we've had all that nicely standardized for years (although I could still strangle someone at MS at least once a week/month.) We tend to minimize external API use, whether ObjectArx/Win32/MFC, and try to have portable code. Granted, it's mostly Win32 dependent and perhaps lacks... Read more →

An interview with Don Syme

As mentioned in this previous post, I had the great pleasure of spending a day up at Microsoft Research in Cambridge last week. My host, Don Syme, took great care of me and was very generous with his time and knowledge. Some background on why I decided to request a meeting with Don: Don is the person behind F#, a new programming language that has, over the last year or so, transitioned from being a research project to a fully-fledged .NET language with full support in Microsoft's development tools. Expect to see the capability to create F# projects (just... Read more →

F# takes an important step closer to official release

This just may be the catalyst I needed to get around to installing Visual Studio 2008: the availability of the F# September 2008 Community Technology Preview. This takes F# an important step closer to being a full .NET citizen, with the first release delivered by Microsoft's Developer Division (the previous releases having been delivered by Microsoft Research). It's not required to use VS 2008 with this release of F#, but that's the version that's been targeted for the IDE integration, naturally enough. I've been holding off from installing VS 2008 for some time - mainly as ObjectARX applications still... Read more →

A cool tool for identifying .NET API enhancements

A member of our AutoCAD Engineering team pointed me at this very cool tool - the Framework Design Studio. The wiki doesn't really do it justice, so here's a post describing what the tool does. I also found it a little trick to get to the download, so here's the latest version at the time of posting. So what's so cool about this tool, as a developer working with AutoCAD? It seems as though the tool was primarily intended to allow platform developers to identify when their changes impact API compatibility, but it's also useful for developers working on... Read more →

A good resource for finding out about the newer features in C#

I've mentioned before how much I appreciate the content on MSDN's Channel 9. For those of you who are familiar with C# 1.0, but haven't yet taken the time to dive into the language features introduced since then, I strongly recommend the "whirlwind" series posted on Channel 9. Here's a quick description of what these whirlwinds are all about: Whirlwinds are bite-sized webcasts, each is shorter than 15 minutes. You can start anywhere in the series to learn about the parts you're most interested in. Here are links to the individual whirlwinds: What's new in C# 2 Whirlwind 1... Read more →

Using Reflector to diagnose tail call optimization in F#

I've talked about Lutz Roeder's Reflector tool a couple of times and it's proven to be very useful to me, once again. I mentioned in my last post about some problems I was having with tail recursion, and my choice to replace certain recursive functions with iterative versions. Today we're going to use Reflector to take a look under the hood of some compiled assemblies, to determine which recursive functions have been optimised correctly and which have not. Let's start by taking a look at the two recursive functions I mentioned last time, starting with the most simple: //... Read more →

Source now available for the .NET Framework 3.5

A quick post, for now, just to point you to this blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/sburke/archive/2008/01/16/configuring-visual-studio-to-debug-net-framework-source-code.aspx This will only work with Visual Studio 2008, it seems, so I haven't yet tested this out myself (I tend to be a laggard when it comes to Visual Studio, for some reason). A quick note on what I've been up to in my spare time: I'm currently diving deeply into F#, to prepare for some internal presentations I'll be giving in February. As part of the exercise I went up to the attic and dusted off the 3.5" floppies containing my old final year project... Read more →

Microbenchmarking C# code

Jeremy Tammik, from our DevTech EMEA team, pointed me to this useful and interesting site: http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/benchmark.html It introduces a very easy way to benchmark functions in your application by simply tagging them with a [Benchmark] attribute (you also need to have included the C# file posted on the above site in your project, of course). Jeremy also highlighted a very pertinent paragraph in the above site: Use local variables where possible. The CLR can do a more optimisations on code which doesn't (for the most part) "escape" from just local variables. For instance, it doesn't need to worry about... Read more →

Metaprogramming with AutoCAD - Part 3

In parts 1 & 2 of this series we looked at metaprogramming with AutoCAD using AutoLISP and VB(A), and then using VB.NET and C#. In this post we're going to look at what's possible from F#, through the lens of my relative inexperience with the language, of course. The quotations mechanism in F# appears to be the way to represent, analyse and execute program structure. This article describes the concepts, although it's quite deep and doesn't address the case that's most immediately interesting to AutoCAD develeopers: the ability to evaluate and execute code represented as a string. In fact,... Read more →

Metaprogramming with AutoCAD - Part 2

In this post we're going to continue the topic started in Part 1 of this series, which looked briefly at metaprogramming with AutoCAD using AutoLISP and VB(A). Now we're going to look at .NET, focusing initially on C# and VB.NET. [I found the inspiration for the code in this post from The Code Project, although I had to update the code to use non-deprecated CLR methods as well as making it work for AutoCAD, of course.] While .NET doesn't provide something as simple as an Eval() function, it actually provides something much more interesting. The CLR exposes the ability... Read more →

Visual Studio 2008 & .NET Framework 3.5 released

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5. For the announcement see Soma's blog and for more detailed information see Scott Guthrie's. I haven't yet worked with this version of Visual Studio, but I'm told it installs side-by-side with previous versions of Visual Studio, so I'll be taking a look after AU. Some of the areas I'm especially interested in - and this is not an exhaustive list of all the cool stuff the release includes... :-) C#/VB language features, many of which have come from the world of functional programming Automatic properties, extension methods, lambda... Read more →

My first F# application for AutoCAD

I couldn't resist... I just had to have a play with this technology, today. :-) Here are the steps to get your first (very simple) F# application working inside AutoCAD. First we need to download and install the latest F# distributable from here (at the time of writing this was the July 31 release - 1.9.2.9). We create a base F# project, selecting the "F# Project" template: We now add a new item to the project of type "F# Source File" to the project: The file created contains a lot of boilerplate code that is definitely worth looking at... Read more →

F# - a perfect fit for AutoCAD .NET programming?

I've just come across the announcement for F#, and am pretty excited about it. Here's the link to Soma's blog, and here's the Microsoft Research F# site. F# is a functional programming language. Functional programming has a long association with technical computing, one of the reasons LISP was chosen as the initial programming interface for AutoCAD. On a personal note: aside from the work I've done with LISP over the years, I also studied an obscure functional language called Miranda during my university days and have since worked a lot with XSLT (which is at least influenced by functional... Read more →

AU Handouts: There's More to .DWG Than AutoCAD® - Part 2

[This post continues from the last post, which I've been back and modified slightly since it was posted.] Using the DWG Thumbnail in a simple application Thumbnail images, when they exist inside a drawing, live in a predictable place at the beginning of the file. This makes it possible for a module – such as an ActiveX control – to extract the thumbnail information when pointed at a DWG file and generate an image from it. All done without the need for RealDWG (which also does this, but with a much heavier runtime component). A number of 3rd party... Read more →

AU Handouts: There's More to .DWG Than AutoCAD® - Part 1

[As mentioned in the last post, I'll be publishing chunks of the handouts for my AU classes via this blog over the coming weeks] Introduction This session focuses on downstream technologies that can be used to access DWG content outside of AutoCAD-based products. We’re going to start by creating a basic model inside AutoCAD comprised of 3D solid objects, and then look at a simple AutoCAD .NET application to access information about those solids. We will then take the same code and build a non-graphical (in terms of geometry - it does, after all, have a GUI) application around... Read more →

Microsoft to release source for .NET Framework Libraries

I thought I'd bring your attention to this post on Scott Guthrie's blog - this is a really exciting announcement for .NET developers everywhere: Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries Read more →

One for the bit-twiddlers

In the last post we looked at some of the potential uses for the Reflector application. I didn't end up elaborating on the third reason I stated for the Reflector being a compelling tool - that it can be used to help optimize code based on the resultant IL created. For fun I played around with using the Reflector to compare similarly structured code, and thought I'd use this post to share my approach and the results. Firstly, though, I recommend taking a look at this useful primer on MSIL. Now, let’s take some nearly identical code, and compare... Read more →

Reflecting on AutoCAD .NET

Reflection Now we’re finally going to spend some time looking at Reflection. As mentioned in a previous post, .NET assemblies include intermediate language instructions plus metadata about types, members and assembly references. It is possible to access this information through Reflection. For another definition of Reflection, here’s what MSDN has to say about System.Reflection: The System.Reflection namespace contains types that retrieve information about assemblies, modules, members, parameters, and other entities in managed code by examining their metadata. These types also can be used to manipulate instances of loaded types, for example to hook up events or to invoke methods.... Read more →

More on IP protection and obfuscation

In the last-post-but-one we took an introductory look at protecting intellectual property in various types of application modules used with AutoCAD. Thanks to everyone for the subsequent discussion – it’s great to see such diversity of opinion out there on this subject. Before moving on to Reflection and the Reflector tool, I thought I’d first follow up on this previous post. So… regarding the various comments - here are the points that resonated particularly with me: It’s not always important to obfuscate – much standard implementation work doesn’t contain trade secrets, for instance, and some software providers (including Microsoft... Read more →