2015
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Autodesk sponsors a great event, here in my home town: the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF). An old friend and colleague from the UK, Nick Manning, typically comes across to talk at the event, as well as to present the Imaging the Future award: 5,000 CHF for the international competition film with the best production design. The 2015 winner was a post-apocalyptic Ethiopian movie called Crumbs. This year's festival – the 15th edition – closed its doors on Saturday. Over the years the NIFFF has really grown in stature, and regularly attracts impressive guest speakers from the film industry…
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After the last post, where we saw some code that creates an AutoCAD table based on the blocks in a drawing, in this post we're going to modify our table, adding a new, initial column that numbers the contents. Here's what we want to create using our new MBT command: Here's the way the command looks when it runs: And, finally, here's the updated C# code with our new MBT command: using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; namespace TableCreationAndModification { public class Commands { const double rowHeight = 3.0, colWidth = 5.0; const…
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This post – and the one to follow it – were inspired by a comment on this old post (which in many ways is quite similar to this one, just using an older syntax and starting with a static array of table data). We're creating a table with information about the various blocks in the block table of the current drawing: in this post we create the basic table containing the table name and its thumbnail, while in the next post we're going add some additional (and as-yet-to-be-determined) information. The basic point is to show how to manipulate an existing…
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It's time for another trip down memory lane… From time to time, I hear people talking about Autodesk's more "radical" R&D investments… whether in the consumer software space – much of which is being driven by the Maker movement – or related to the bio/nano research Andrew Hessel and team are performing at Pier 9. I can understand that to some this might seem as though Autodesk is departing from its core mission, in some way. I have a slightly different perspective on this… yes, we had perhaps 15 years of our history – largely during the Bartz era –…
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Last week I was in Singapore for our annual, internal, two-day technical summit. Upwards of 500 members of Autodesk's various engineering and technical teams gathered together at the iconic Marina Bay Sands for the event. The hotel was pretty amazing. Having been told my room number (4619), I first exited the elevator at the 4th floor. It's only then that I realised the rooms on each floor were numbered in double digits, and so my room was on the 46th! While I didn't end up making much use of the hotel's facilities – aside from the conference centre, of course…
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I mentioned in a recent post about some code I put together to replace a drawing's internal block structure with external references. The code determines the blocks used in the modelspace and then works through, saving each to a file via the wblock mechanism and then attaching them back in as Xrefs. The code was surprisingly easy to put together. It's a bit on the destructive side – it rips out blocks and creates equivalent drawings in the temp folder – so I do suggest running this on a copy of your drawings. But as part of a process exporting…
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When I was a boy, I used to love going to play with toys at my grandmother's house. My absolute favourite was a die-cast Batmobile made by Corgi in the UK. What I particularly liked about this toy was its hidden features: the cars apparently came with secret instructions, although these were nowhere to be seen by the time I started playing with it. The Batmobile had plastic flames that came out of the exhaust when the rear wheels turned and spring-loadable, vertical rocket launchers. The biggest surprise was when I discovered the cutting blade that popped out of the…
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Quite a milestone has just been passed: more than a million apps have now been downloaded from Autodesk Exchange. The store has been running for a little over three years and is apparently home to over 1,800 apps in 14 languages that are available for download in 191 countries. Wow. Be sure to check out Autodesk Exchange Apps for AutoCAD, the largest of our various stores. Here's a quick video celebrating this momentous event: I'm about to head home from Singapore after a great week at the Autodesk Technical Summit 2015. I'll try to share some impressions once I'm back…
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After the first two successful Cloud Accelerators held in San Francisco, it's time to go international. The next one, labeled a Cloud Accelerator Extension, is being held in the beautiful Czech city of Prague from September 13-18, 2015. This is a great opportunity to kick-start your development using Autodesk's PaaS infrastructure. Members of the ADN and Engineering teams – me included – will be on-hand to help you work through any development issues you hit while creating or honing your Autodesk Cloud API-integrated application. So come join me in Prague for a fun week of cloud-oriented development. All you need…
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Looks like this week is going to be all about sweat. Hopefully there won't be blood and tears to go along with it. On Friday I drove with my family across to Verona, Italy, for Autodesk's annual football (soccer) tournament. This year was incredible: 20 teams from around the world showed up with around 600 people (between the players and supporters). We had hoped that Google Maps' estimate of the length of the drive would more or less accurate at 5 hours 40 minutes, but – through no fault of Google's – it ended up taking a brutal 8 hours.…