Through the Interface

Announcing DevBlogs from ADN

I’m very happy to announce the creation of a series of new blogs by the Autodesk Developer Network team, marking a significant shift from the team creating material that’s only available to ADN members (i.e. DevNotes behind the ADN extranet) to creating material that’s available to everyone. The first two are available now: AutoCAD DevBlog Infrastructure Modeling DevBlog (You’ll find the ADN team has been generating material for some time, building up a decent head of steam before launching publicly.) To explain a bit of the background to these posts, check out Stephen Preston’s welcome post. Expect more of... Read more →

A new Autodesk blog on partnering: Dances with Elephants

I’m delighted to be announcing that Jim Quanci, Director of the Autodesk Developer Network, has started a blog on partnering with large companies such as Autodesk: Dances with Elephants. I know Jim has been considering writing a blog for some time, and I’m really happy he’s managed to find the time in his busy schedule to get this one going. I’ve worked with Jim pretty much since I started at Autodesk, and have reported directly to him for the last 6.5 years (although that will change in a few short weeks). I’m definitely going to miss being part of... 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 →

A couple of blog enhancements

I’ve made added a few new features to this blog over the last few weeks, to help people find related content and to get content in their preferred language. At the bottom of each post – both on the individual posts and the index pages – you’ll find a set of thumbnails delivered by LinkWithin which link – hopefully, at least – to related posts on this blog. Going by the number of people using them to access additional content on the blog, it seems to be of benefit to some readers, at least. I’ve also just integrated a... Read more →

A new blog on AutoCAD Civil 3D development

Many readers of this blog are developing code to work with AutoCAD Civil 3D, so I have no doubt that the information in today’s post will be welcomed. Isaac Rodriguez, the Software Engineering Lead for the AutoCAD Civil 3D API, has started Civilized Development, a new blog about developing for AutoCAD Civil 3D. In his welcome post, Isaac describes his motivations for creating the blog and sets expectations for his readers. In case you have suggestions of topics for Isaac to cover, you can post a comment on his blog, email him or contact him via Twitter. A very... Read more →

It’s All Just Ones and Zeros: new Autodesk Vault developer blog

I’d like to extend a warm welcome to the Autodesk developer blogosphere to Doug Redmond, who has recently started a blog focused on programming and administering Autodesk Vault, It’s All Just Ones and Zeros. Doug is a long-time contributor to Autodesk’s development community, whether helping my team deal with complex API issues or presenting the Vault API at ADN events and at AU, he has a boundless passion for helping people customizing and developing with Autodesk Vault. If you’re interested in working deeply with Vault technology – or are already doing so – then I’m sure that Doug’s blog... Read more →

Autodesk Search Beta

As Jeremy Tammik reported a few weeks ago, Autodesk Search Beta is now available. Here are the results of my quick “vanity search” on this site… this isn’t really egosurfing in its purist sense (although I admit I do Google my name pretty regularly – just to see who’s quoting my blog :-), it’s more about making sure that this blog is being indexed. Honest. Sure enough, a number of posts on this site came up in the results, which is encouraging. On a somewhat related note, I’ve been waiting for some time for our blogs to be indexed... Read more →

ShareThis button added to Through the Interface

By popular request (well, in honesty I received one request via Twitter from @MattAnderson, but it seemed like such a good idea :-) I have added a ShareThis button to this blog’s right-sash navigation. Clicking this should now allow you to share the current page (whether the site itself or an individual post – whichever is loaded in the browser) via a social networking/bookmarking site or with an email/SMS/AIM recipient. I have to admit to not being up-to-speed with the latest & greatest ways people share information on the web, so I’ve just accepted the default options (which will... Read more →

Happy birthday to me… happy birthday to me…

Well, happy birthday to “Through the Interface”, anyway. :-) 3 years, 394 posts and 2,559 comments later, TTIF is still going strong. In fact, it’s now the 2nd most visited Autodesk blog, after Shaan’s (some of our blogs with shorter posts publish their full content via RSS, so this doesn’t necessarily completely reflect the relative readership, but hey). Here’s a graph of the page hits over the last three years… I think the number on the Y-axis reflects the total page hits in a monthly window (at least that’s what seems to make sense). [I’m not too worried about... Read more →

AutoCAD Exchange, new blogs, webcast recordings posted

This post is a miscellaneous update on things I’ve put off announcing because of all the fun I’ve been having with AutoCAD 2010’s Overrule API. First up is the AutoCAD Exchange, a new site devoted to people working with, you guessed it, AutoCAD. It’s stocked with lots of useful and fun content, as well as providing social networking capabilities (be sure to add me as a contact via the Networking area of the site). Next is Without a Net, a blog hosted by an old friend of mine, Tom Stoeckel, along with esteemed colleagues Tom Bradley and Dan Scales.... Read more →

Through the Interface moving from TypePad to Twitter

As of tomorrow, I will be transitioning away from posting to this site via TypePad in favour of micro-blogging via the increasingly-popular Twitter service. If you would like to follow me on Twitter, you can do so via http://twitter.com/keanw. Any lengthy monologues (and yes, I know I’m prone to these, from time to time :-) will either be condensed down to 140 characters or serialized over multiple tweets. The same holds for code samples: I expect this to force me to be more disciplined about keeping my code succinct (although on the downside I plan on completely eradicating comments... Read more →

Creating your own custom RSS feeds with Yahoo! Pipes

Some of you might consider this to be slightly off topic (unless you make some bizarre connection with the fact that Carol Bartz is now CEO of Yahoo! :-). Actually there is a more direct connection, as the technology I'm introducing in this post - and have just had lots of fun playing around with - has some really interesting capabilities for people who would like to filter and customize the various RSS feeds to which they subscribe. Firstly I'd like to thank my friend and colleague Shaan Hurley for telling me about Yahoo! Pipes. This technology - which... Read more →

Navigation blues...

I need to vent. I've had an open ticket with Six Apart (the people providing TypePad, the service on which this blog is hosted) since January 2nd of this year. Kerry Brown had kindly pointed out a problem with Through the Interface's calendar navigation on December 26th, but as I was on vacation it took me a few days to get around to submitting the issue. The issue was related to an enhancement I made to this blog's navigation some time ago: somebody suggested showing more than a single month of posts, so I implemented an advanced template feature... Read more →

Offline reading of "Through the Interface"

A member of my team recently asked me to extend this blog's standard RSS feed to include more than 10 entries: he wanted a feed that contained all the entries ever posted to "Through the Interface". It turns out he uses Outlook 2007's RSS capability to download the full contents of items in an RSS feed, so he can then use his Outlook-integrated search capabilities to search his various email archives - as well as this blog's contents - whenever he's researching a technical query. He had a number of the earlier posts missing from Outlook and wanted the... Read more →

Announcing two new Autodesk developer blogs

Now for something I hinted at in this previous post... I'm very happy to announce that Through the Interface has two new siblings: Mod the Machine is a blog devoted to developers working with Autodesk Inventor and is written by Brian Ekins, Inventor API designer. The Building Coder is a blog devoted to developers working with Autodesk Revit and is written by Jeremy Tammik from our European DevTech team. For those of you working with one of these products, I strongly recommend subscribing to their respective RSS feeds (here for Mod the Machine, and here for The Building Coder).... Read more →

Master list of "Through the Interface" posts

As mentioned in this recent post, I've been meaning to create a master page of all the posts I've made since the blog was born in mid-2006. Well, here is that page. Please check it out and let me know what you think. Once I get feedback on the page, I'll go ahead and add a link to it from one or other of the navigation sidebars. I can also apply the type of view used on the page to the various category-/date-based archive pages, if people generally consider it to be more helpful than the current approach (which... Read more →

"Through the Interface" has a new look

Many of you will have noticed the blog's new design. Hopefully you will find the new look both pleasing to the eye and easier to read/navigate (I personally like the new design very much - even down to the way the comments are now listed and something as fundamental as the font's typeface and colour). There may be a few differences - such as the display of one month's post history in calendar view, rather than three - but I expect to readjust these items over the coming weeks. I'm also hoping to find a way to provide a... Read more →

Using F# Asynchronous Workflows to simplify concurrent programming in AutoCAD

In the last post we saw some code that downloaded data - serially - from a number of websites via RSS and created AutoCAD entities linking to the various posts. As promised, in today's post we take that code and enable it to query the same data in parallel by using Asynchronous Workflows in F#. Asynchronous Workflows are an easy-to-use yet powerful mechanism for enabling concurrent programming in F#. Firstly, a little background as to why this type of technique is important. As many - if not all - of you are aware, the days of raw processor speed... Read more →

Turning AutoCAD into an RSS reader with F#

OK, OK, you are probably thinking "why would anyone ever want to use AutoCAD as an RSS reader?". The answer is, of course, "they wouldn't". The point of the next few posts is not actually to enable AutoCAD to be used to read RSS, but to show how it is possible to use F# and .NET to extract information from RSS feeds and create corresponding AutoCAD entities. The reason I came onto this subject will also become more clear when you see my next post: I have been researching Asynchronous Workflows in F# - an uber-cool mechanism for managing... Read more →

New Autodesk Labs blog

Scott Sheppard - the original author of the very informative DWF blog, Beyond the Paper - has launched a new blog talking about Autodesk Labs, called It's Alive in the Lab. I'm looking forward to seeing lots of cool information on Labs technology coming through this blog. Read more →