AU
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I'm a bit late announcing this, but as I'm due to submit my own proposals for Autodesk University 2011 by the May 6th deadline, I thought I'd post a quick note to remind readers of the fast-closing window of opportunity to submit your own proposals to speak at this year's AU. I'm definitely submitting a session showing how to integrate AutoCAD with Kinect (please don't go stealing my idea, now ;-), and I'm chewing on another topic, which may prove to be "choosing the right programming language for working with AutoCAD". I'm still open to delivering additional sessions, in case…
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One AU evening at the bar, I was chatting to a couple of developers who suggested covering some fundamental mathematics on this blog: their respective career paths had not involved any formal (or perhaps recent) studies of certain important areas of mathematics, especially related to core linear algebra concepts such as matrix multiplication. Part of me said, "what a great idea", another part said "I wonder what resources are already out there" and the last said "oh man, I don't remember how all that stuff actually works". ๐ Before I start dusting off some of that well-buried geometrical knowledge, I…
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As many of you may now be aware, much of the content recorded at this year's Autodesk University is now available on the AU website. You'll find the recording of my AU Virtual session, "Getting to Know the AutoCADยฎ Plug-ins of the Month", as well as material from the two physical sessions I presented, "Point Clouds on a Shoestring" and "Integrate F# into Your C# or VB.NET Application for an 8x Performance Boost". In fact, much to my surprise, the "Point Clouds on a Shoestring" session (which turned out to be my highest-rated session) ended up being recorded, and can…
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I was hoping to post during the week from Las Vegas, but it didn't end up happening. My time just bled away between the various classes I recorded/ presented/co-paneled and the time spent catching up with old friends and making new ones โ mainly from among the various people who took the chance to provide greatly appreciated feedback regarding this blog. All in all it was a great week โ as it always is โ but it wasn't all smooth sailing: my AU Virtual session on our Plugins of the Month โ which I'd struggled to get into Vegas to…
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It was a bit of a schlep, but I got here. My flight out of Geneva was delayed due to inclement weather: the first (actually quite mild) snowstorm of the season. The runway was closed for some time and there was a 1+-hour backlog on de-icing, so I sat helplessly watching my connection time in Heathrow dissipate to nothing. In the end, after a 3-hour delay, this initial flight arrived 5 minutes after my direct connection to Las Vegas had left. I had the choice of waiting a full 24-hours โ as BA fly once a day direct to Las…
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I've now checked in for my flight to Las Vegas โ and, thanks to Jeremy Tammik's recent troubles, I luckily renewed my ESTA โ so I'm pretty much all set for my trip to AU 2010, at least from a travel perspective. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that the gastric 'flu my kids seem to have come down with doesn't hit me before I leave (or once I'm at AUโฆ what a grim thought). I was going to keep today's post light, just like the last one, but then decided to dip into my email folder of externally contributed…
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I'm heads-down in final preparation mode for AU 2010 and so won't post anything very detailed for the rest of the week, but I did just want to share a series of programming gems that I stumbled across the other day. James Michael Hare has published a great series entitled "C#/.NET Little Wonders": C#/.NET Five Little Wonders (part 1) The Null Coalescing Operator (??) The As Cast Auto-Properties The Stopwatch Class TimeSpan factory methods C#/.NET Five More Little Wonders (part 2) string.IsNullOrEmpty() and string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace() string.Equals() using Statements static Class Modifier Object and Collection Initializers C#/.NET Five Final Little Wonders (part…
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This handout is for the companion class to the one whose handout formed my last post. While that class was user-focused, this one, "CP322-2 - Integrate F# into Your C# or VB.NET Application for an 8x Performance Boost", is more developer-focused and takes the hood off the implementation of the BrowsePhotosynth application. The code for this special version of the application โ which imports synchronously via C# and synchronously/asynchronously via F# โ is available here for download. Introduction This class takes a look at the implementation of BrowsePhotosynth for AutoCAD, the ADN Plugin of the Month from October 2010 and…
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I've been a little slow getting my AU material together, this year (I've been called onto more pressing issues fairly consistently over the last weeks/months), so I'm very much up against Monday's content submission deadline. I'll certainly have the handouts ready, but the presentations will have to come later. As I've done in the past, I like to post my handouts here for people to take a look at (and provide feedback on in time for me to correct prior to the event ;-). Today's post is the handout for my AutoCAD user-focused class, "AC427-4 - Point Clouds on a…
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Many of you will have seen previous incarnations of this tool, during its development. It's a little more complex than most of our other monthly plugins โ mostly as it depends on a couple of external components โ but the functionality should hopefully be simple enough to understand and use. I won't go into great details here, but if you're using AutoCAD 2011, give it a try by downloading the ZIP from the Autodesk Labs Plugin of the Month site and executing the contained installer package. From there you should be able to run the BROWSEPS command inside AutoCAD to…