Through the Interface

Extracting code from blog posts using F# – Part 1

I mentioned some weeks ago that I was looking to automate the validation of a bunch of source files I have on disk before uploading them to GitHub. I decided to get started on that, this week, to see what was involved. As mentioned in the previous post, I wanted to programmatically query posts from Typepad, extract any embedded code from them and compare it with what I had on disk, to see which files were already correct and which needed to be created or removed. The first step was to choose a language. The fact this is really... Read more →

Building a web-based viewer using the Autodesk View & Data API – Part 2

In the last post we saw the process for getting content uploaded to Autodesk storage and translated into the format required by the Autodesk 360 viewer. In this post we’re going to show the steps to take that data and embed it in a “simple” HTML page. (Any complex capability in this page it’s due to the UI code that Dan Wellman kindly allowed me to borrow for the sample: otherwise what it does is very simple indeed.) There are, of course, more complex samples that the ADN team has developed to demonstrate the richness of the new View... Read more →

Building a web-based viewer using the Autodesk View & Data API – Part 1

Over the next few posts we’re going to take a look at the steps needed to build the Steampunk Morgan Viewer, my first sample using Autodesk’s new View & Data API. In today’s post we’re going to look at the steps needed to host content to be served up to instances of the viewer. In a subsequent post we’ll look at the client-side implementation, connecting to and streaming down content and controlling how it gets viewed. So let’s start with some basics. The first thing you need to do when working with the new View & Data API is... Read more →

DogeSharp in AutoCAD

Sometimes you just need to ease back into work after a few weeks off. So today I decided to have a go at integrating DogeSharp – a programming language on top of of .NET inspired by Dogescript – into AutoCAD. There was absolutely no reason to do so, other than to cause myself some amusement. Which is actually a pretty good reason, now that I think about it. For those of you who – like me – are almost completely unaware of Internet memes such as Doge, this was apparently a big one in 2013 and all started with... Read more →

My first Autodesk 360 viewer sample

As mentioned last week, I’ve been having fun with Fusion 360 to prepare a model to be displayed in the new Autodesk 360 viewer. The sample is now ready to view, although I’m not yet quite ready to post the code directly here, mainly because the API isn’t yet publicly usable. Here’s the app for you to take for a spin, as it were. The Autodesk 360 Viewing & Data API is currently being piloted by a few key partners, and hopefully we’ll soon be broadening the scope to allow others to get involved (we first have to iron... Read more →

Steampunking a Morgan 3 Wheeler using Fusion 360

My friends in the Autodesk Developer Network team asked me to get involved with creating a sample for the API we’re planning to launch soon for the new Autodesk 360 viewer. They were quite specific about the requirements, which was very helpful: something fun, perhaps with a steampunk theme, that shows some interesting possibilities around both the HTML5 container and the embedded viewer. I was also suggested the Morgan 3 Wheeler as a possible model to look into hosting, so I really didn’t need to be asked twice. ;-) I started by tracking down a model: I ended up... Read more →

ReCap API article on ProgrammableWeb

Just a quick post to finish up the week: over on ProgrammableWeb, there’s a nice article talking about the new ReCap Photo Web API and how a number of developers are making use of it to drive interesting new categories of application, such as products creating designs for custom hearing aids or automating the 4D capture of construction sites. Really cool stuff. We’ll be talking more about web APIs over the coming weeks. Watch this space! Read more →

A sneak peek at the new Autodesk 360 viewer

For those of you who have signed up for the Autodesk 360 Technical Preview, you may well have already gotten a taste for its new viewing capability. Upload a 3D model of pretty much any format (the list is pretty exhaustive and goes well beyond Autodesk’s own formats, but you might try with DWG, RVT, IAM, IPT, NWD and DWF, to name a few to get you started) and you’ll see the viewer enabled for that model: Before we go on, please bear in mind that this is very much still in Beta: it’s early days and the team... Read more →

JavaScript in AutoCAD: Viewing 3D solids using Three.js

After introducing the series and looking at sample applications for 2D graphics using Paper.js and 2.5D graphics using Isomer, it’s now really time to go 3D. We’re going to use much of the same code we saw in the last post – with some simplification as we no longer need to sort the solids by distance – but this time we’re going to feed data into an HTML client app that’s fundamentally similar in nature to the one seen in this series of posts using Three.js. I’m happy to have some experience using Three.js, because it happens to be... Read more →

JavaScript in AutoCAD: Isometric views of 3D solids

After introducing the series and looking at a sample 2D JavaScript application, it’s time to go 3D. Well, 2.5D, anyway. We’re going to implement a simple sample using the Isomer library that extracts bounding box information about 3D solids – which could be extended to get more detailed topological information, albeit with quite some work – and displays them in an isometric view in the HTML canvas. This time we’re only going to have a single button in our UI allowing model updates to be refreshed in our isometric view. I decided to leave this as a manual operation,... Read more →

JavaScript in AutoCAD: Revision clouds using Paper.js

Having introduced this series, it’s time to look at some code. This first sample shows how to create and host a web-page that uses an external graphics library – in our case Paper.js – within an AutoCAD application. The main “trick” to this is going to be getting the data from the HTML page into AutoCAD, which we’ll do by extending AutoCAD’s shaping layer. Bear in mind that this code will work with AutoCAD 2015, but I can’t guarantee it will do so with 2014 (the JavaScript API was very much a “preview” in that release). Something I should... Read more →

JavaScript in AutoCAD: Introducing the series

During the last week or so I’ve put together a number of new sample integrations of JavaScript-based technologies with AutoCAD, mainly to form the basis of my proposed AU2014 class but also (obviously) to share here. This first post introduces the series, giving an overview of some benefits – as I see them – of adopting this development environment. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, over the years I’ve had a love/hate relationship with HTML and JavaScript: I’m comfortable working with them but have lived through plenty of frustrating moments. These days, though, I’m finding it to be very... Read more →

Adding a web-page as a document tab in AutoCAD 2015 using .NET

This was a fun one. It was really only a single line of code but I decided to embellish it a bit to make it a bit more useful. The “task” I set myself was to open a web-page – this blog, in fact – inside AutoCAD as an MDI child. AutoCAD can now host web-pages directly inside its MDI frame – the New Tab Page is a great example of that – and this mechanism can be used for external applications, too. You can also load non-HTML documents into the frame, but it’s quick and easy to use... Read more →

Autodesk ReCap Connect: a partner program for ReCap

It’s Good Friday, so much of the world will be offline today, but I thought I’d post quickly on some (good) news that may be of interest to people. The ReCap team has officially launched a new partner program. This provides access to a number of mechanisms for integrating with or harnessing Autodesk ReCap products and services. The Capture Codec Kit is primarily for importing custom point cloud formats – something important for hardware manufacturers, particularly – into Autodesk ReCap on the desktop. Embedded ReCap OEM allows generated or post-processed point cloud data to be brought into Autodesk’s design... Read more →

Call for proposals for Autodesk University 2014 approaching

The “call for proposals” for AU2014 is going out on April 23rd and will remain open for about a month. This is approaching quickly, so get your thinking hats on if you’re considering submitting a class proposal. From my side I’m thinking about a few possible topics: Implementing a tangible user interface for AutoCAD using SensorTag Integrating a web-based user interface into AutoCAD via its JavaScript API I’m also toying around with the idea of doing a kind of “meta” session, during which we’d look at some of my favourite blog posts/areas of research over the years. Something like... Read more →

The Autodesk Community gets a facelift

It seems there’s more and more support traffic from developers going through the Autodesk Community, these days – I know the ADN team has been encouraging use of the developer-centric forums, which appears to be having some effect – and the site itself has just been on the receiving end of a much-welcomed redesign. The redesign is intended to improve the “findability” of community content as well as providing a more personalised experience for users. Here’s a screenshot of my own welcome page on the Autodesk Community, for instance: Yes, it’s been a while since my last forum post.... Read more →

Coursera and the future of education

It’s my mum that first pointed me at Coursera. Yes, that’s right: my mother. That’s quite an admission for a software professional to make, I’m sure you’ll agree, but then my mother does spend more time listening to the radio than I do (and there’s been some recent coverage of Coursera on BBC Radio 4). Despite this ignorance I’m actually very interested in the area of Massive Online Online Courses (MOOCs). A couple of years ago I talked about Khan Academy (which is not really classified as a MOOC, as such, but might be considered a comparable resource) and... Read more →

Google Chrome Web Lab’s Sketchbots: bits to atoms, zen-style

I clicked on through to the Chrome Web Lab from the Google home-page, yesterday. It contains some cool “experiments” that showcase the capabilities of modern web-browsers (and presumably Google Chrome, in particular). The one that especially caught my interest was number 3, the Sketchbots experiment: The experiment starts with an uploaded photo or – and this is what I did, in my case – a snapshot taken from your system’s webcam. Some image processing and computer vision techniques then get applied to it – essentially to perform edge detection and convert those edges to vectors – and the resultant... Read more →

Cloud & mobile series summary

As we reach the end of this long series of posts on moving code to the cloud – and a look at ways to use the functionality from a wide variety of applications, many of them on mobile devices – I felt it was worth putting together a quick summary post to reinforce the overall message (which may have been a bit lost in the sheer volume of information). Firstly, here are the posts in this series, including those looking at the original creation of the “desktop” application functionality: Creating the core desktop functionality Circle packing in AutoCAD: creating... Read more →

Creating a 3D viewer for our Apollonian service using HTML5 – Part 3

To finish off our look at developing an HTML5-based 3D viewer for our Apollonian web-service, today’s post integrates the trackball capability of the Three.js library. Many thanks to Jeff Geer for once again pointing me in the right direction on this. :-) The trackball capability allows you not to worry about manual implementation of 3D navigation inside your viewer: you simply set up some basic parameters to indicate the size of your model and the speed with which you want navigation to occur – as well as the keys for rotate, zoom and pan – and then you just... Read more →