Through the Interface

November’s Plugin of the Month live on Autodesk Labs: ScriptPro 2.0 for AutoCAD

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As mentioned previously, Viru Aithal, from DevTech India, has been working hard on a replacement for the venerable ScriptPro tool. I'm delighted to say that it's now ready, and is live on Autodesk Labs as November's Plugin of the Month.

Viru took the codebase he developed for the DWF/PDF Batch Publish tool and created ScriptPro 2.0, written from the ground up in C# and developed without any dependency on a specific AutoCAD version. Viru's approach uses the equivalent of late binding to call into AutoCAD through COM and so doesn't require a specific AutoCAD Type Library. Which means the tool should also work for future versions of AutoCAD: there's no longer any need to wait for an update to the tool. And one advantage of being written in a .NET language is that the application works as well on 64-bit platforms as it does on 32-bit ones (a historical frustration of ScriptPro users).

ScriptPro 2.0 has a new project format – with the file extension .BPL (for Batch Process List). While it can load old ScriptPro projects (.SCP), it doesn't yet have perfect feature parity – there are some ScriptPro-specific keywords that have not yet been implemented in the 2.0 release, but (providing we hear it's important to do so) we'll get there.

The tool has a ribbon UI – built using WPF – but the bulk of the functionality is packaged up in a WinForms User Control and hosted by the WPF app (me may yet move the whole thing to WPF, in time). Here's the new UI:

ScriptPro 2.0

And the best thing is that – as a Plugin of the Month – it comes with the complete source code for you to dig into and extend. Be sure to take a look at this very exciting new tool and let us know what you think.

9 responses to “November’s Plugin of the Month live on Autodesk Labs: ScriptPro 2.0 for AutoCAD”

  1. Wes Avatar
    Wes

    Hi Kean:
    This is great. I definite will do something with it.
    when I read the code, I have a question:
    when you separate it to 2 dll file, mainWindow and DrawingListControl. What's benefit?

    Reply
  2. Kean Walmsley Avatar
    Kean Walmsley

    Hi Wes,

    There's really one main reason: the application started off as a Winforms application, but we wanted to add in a ribbon UI using WPF. So we packaged up the original UI into a User Control that gets hosted by an outer WPF application.

    The benefit being we didn't need to rewrite the entire app to use WPF, at least not for now.

    Regards,

    Kean

    Reply
  3. Wes Avatar
    Wes

    Hi Kean:
    Now I have this problem when I modify the code to fit my need, I have AutoCAD Map and AutoCAD Architecture installed on my machine. I like ScriptPro2 to run Map because I will use some Map API. In the code, CreateInstance will launch the later running AutoCAD which could be either one. Is it possible to specify Map will be one to start. After googling, I found someone use Process.Start(), does it work in this situation? I ask this question at newsgroup and ADN but I did not got the answer I want.

    Thank you,
    Wes

    Reply
  4. Kean Walmsley Avatar
    Kean Walmsley

    Hi Wes,

    We had considered putting a configurable option of the path to the executable you wish to launch (which would cause it to be launched and closed prior to the batch process, which should cause it to be called from then on).

    Viru is planning to add it into the next release.

    Thanks for the feedback!

    Kean

    Reply
  5. Wes Avatar
    Wes

    Hi Kean:
    Thank you for your time.
    Now I have this problem, I change some code, and I want to test it. I found out, I have no idea how to test the Run with Failure. How you can make AutoCAD hang or crash?
    btw, I cannot wait to see the new release coming.

    Thank you,
    Wes

    Reply
  6. Kean Walmsley Avatar
    Kean Walmsley

    Hi Wes,

    One option would be to find a drawing that fails, for some reason, or you might also reduce the delay so AutoCAD just doesn't have time to start before being closed (I assume that would work).

    The new version should actually be live on Labs right now (posted late last night), with an announcement going out on Scott's blog later today.

    Let us know how you get on,

    Kean

    Reply
  7. Matthew J Schwartz Avatar
    Matthew J Schwartz

    My ScriptPro Software stopped working, like it was uninstalled and the link has been taken down at the AutoCAD website. Your link leads to:
    The page you are attempting to access is unavailable.

    Reply
  8. Matthew J Schwartz Avatar
    Matthew J Schwartz

    Thankfully I found an external download on softpedia!

    Reply
  9. Ben Avatar
    Ben

    This is the greatest thing ever! I downloaded it from somewhere before and unfortunately I could not find the link to do it again. The only downside to this is that it requires a little knowledge of LISP - which can be extremely frustrating if you don't know any! Still this tool is amazing, i wish i knew more about how it works. i still have the zip file so if any of you are looking for it just PM me. no guarantees as to its contents though. I suspect I may have downloaded my version of script pro from a disreputable source, though it works fine for me without any known glitches 🙂

    Reply

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