AU
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To celebrate my second son's 5th birthday (how time flies!), we visited Disneyland Paris for the long weekend here in Switzerland (it was the Jeûne Fédéral, or Federal Fasting Holiday, which apparently has its roots back in the 15th century). We arrived back, late last night, by the TGV from Paris to Neuchâtel. Aside from being a lot of fun with the kids, it was also quite nostalgic, as my wife and I had last stayed – back in the days before children – at the particular hotel we chose (the Newport Bay Club), during Autodesk's Developer Days event back…
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The class catalog for Autodesk University 2011 is now available to preview in advance of the conference registration opening up on August 30th. Here are the sessions I'm either presenting or hosting: CP3840 Integrating Microsoft® Kinect™ with AutoCAD® Lecture Nov 30, 3:15pm CP4459-U AutoCAD® .NET Development: Tools and Best Practices Unconf-erence Dec 1, 1:15pm I'm also honoured to be co-presenting the following session with the famous (and famously lowercase) dave espinosa-aguilar: CP4717 Unlimited AutoCAD® Scripting for Everyone Lecture Nov 29, 5:00pm And I'm part of the panel for the following sessions: CP2149 AutoCAD® APIs: Meet the Experts Stephen Preston Panel…
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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". 🙂 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 AutoCAD® 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 – 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 – as it always is – but it wasn't all smooth sailing: my AU Virtual session on our Plugins of the Month – 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 – as BA fly once a day direct to Las…
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I've now checked in for my flight to Las Vegas – and, thanks to Jeremy Tammik's recent troubles, I luckily renewed my ESTA – 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 AU… 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 – which imports synchronously via C# and synchronously/asynchronously via F# – 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…