AutoCAD
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In a few weeks I'll be heading back across to Canada for several meetings. During the week of June 15th I'll be in Toronto for internal meetings, then I'll fly across to Calgary (somewhere I haven't been since the early 2000s) on my way to Banff to participate in the SocialSys'26 workshop ahead of the ACM BuildSys conference in Banff. For many old-time Autodeskers, the name Banff immediately brings back memories of AutoCAD, specifically the 2000i release, which had Banff as a codename. This will be my first time visiting Banff - and speaking at BuildSys - so I'm very…
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After posting about our time in Boston and Los Angeles, it's now time to talk about San Francisco. Before finally (in the next post) getting around to the whole point of the trip. Let's hope it's not too much of an anti-climax. On Monday of last week, Dagmara and I arrived in San Francisco after a short hop from LA. Seeing the Marin Airporter brought back lots of memories from when I lived in San Rafael from 2000 to 2003, back before Uber and Lyft made airport drop-offs a breeze. I can't count the number of times I took the…
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After a great first day of Autodesk University - and it's preceding Dynamo Day - it was time for Days 2 and 3. After breakfast and an internal meeting, I headed to the Expo to watch the Day 2 General Session. It wasn't quite as impressive as seeing it in the mainstage venue itself, but it was convenient being able to sit at a table and write up the last blog post. There's something about the view from the escalators that made me want to continually snap this photo! I headed up the escalators to attend Ray Wang's Theater Talk…
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Some weeks ago I joined Evan Troxel for a couple of hours to chat about my journey and some of the projects I've worked on. I've enjoyed the TRXL podcast for some time, so it was a real honour to be invited on. Our discussion has just been published as episode 152. If you prefer video, here's the version from YouTube: Evan's a great interviewer: I enjoyed the session a great deal and I hope you do, too. Listening back to it I realize there's a lot more we could have talked about… hopefully Evan will…
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So I made a thing. Well, strictly speaking I designed a thing that then got made by someone else. We'd been looking for a new gate for some time, but never really found something we liked. I ended up drawing something in AutoCAD (of course) – taking inspiration from a number of images I found on the web – and we took it to Leutwiler SA, a local company who implements custom metalwork projects, including gates and fences. The design I made – which was in any case for just the cosmetic stuff, nothing structural – needed some tweaks: once…
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This post may feel like a blast from the past for any long-time readers still out there. After a break of several years, I'm once again posting about the topic this blog was founded (17 years ago!) to help people get to grips with: AutoCAD and .NET. This is definitely a blip rather than a trend, however: I just wanted to amplify this post by my friend Madhu Moogala, which talks at a very high level about the next release of AutoCAD (2024+1) and its API technology. Cutting to the chase, the nugget of information that interested me most is…
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There's a lot going on with AI at Autodesk, these days: most of our engineering teams have developers who are exploring the potential for AI with respect to product features. For instance, the AutoCAD team has developed and released a number of features driven by machine learning: AutoCAD 2023's Markup Assist and My Insights features – the latter with its cool Macro Advisor capability – are all powered by ML. I'm less familiar with ML-powered features in Revit and Fusion 360, but I know they have teams focusing on exploring the benefits ML might bring to their users. All this…
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I've signed up to help with the Forge Developer Zone in the Exhibit Hall of Autodesk University 2022 in New Orleans, if you're going to be there. Right now I'm planning on being there at these times, in case you want to swing by for a chat: Wednesday September 28th | 11:30am – 1:00pm Thursday September 29th | 11:30am – 1:00pm If you're attending AU – whether physically or virtually – and have an interest in the Forge platform, then you may find this article to be of use. For my own preparation I thought I'd brush up on some…
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I've been getting quite a bit of unsolicited email of late. It started with this one, in late July: Hi Kean,Did you know that a QR code of your email address is currently beingcirculated all around the globe in a viral meme?Cheers, It came with a couple of images attached: Perhaps somewhat rudely I largely ignored it, as I thought it was some elaborate spam or phishing attempt. I did scan the QR codes and found some curious things encoded: my email address, the URL to blogs.autodesk.com, my old Autodesk office phone number, the location of said office, my contact…
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The material for this year's online Autodesk DevDays is now live on YouTube. These sessions were held back in March, but now that the various products discussed have been released publicly, the information has been made available for everyone (i.e. not only covered by the Non-Disclosure Agreement signed by Autodesk Developer Network members, the famously palindromic ADN NDA). Here's the full playlist, if you want to watch it here: Here are links to the individual sessions: Autodesk DevDays 2021 keynotes Inventor, Vault and Fusion API update AutoCAD API update Revit API update Civil 3D update One interesting tidbit from the…