AutoCAD I/O

  • There's a series of webinars starting next week that will help you get a grip on what's coming with various Autodesk platforms, both cloud-based and desktop. It's also a chance to catch up on some of the content that was presented at last year's DevCons. All the below webinars start at the same time: 8am PST  | 11am EST | 4pm GMT | 5pm CET. Don't worry if that time's inconvenient, recordings will be made available soon after the webinars are finished. Please note that while some of the sessions (the last three in the below list) require Autodesk Developer…

  • There's great news for Forge developers looking to modify Revit models – or perform various other operations inside Revit – in the cloud. To complement the current offerings of AutoCAD, Inventor and 3ds Max in Forge's Design Automation API, you can now run headless Revit in the cloud, too. As of Monday of this week the service moved from invitation-only Beta to public Beta. Here's an introduction to this service from the most recent Forge DevCon: This is really interesting with respect to Dasher 360, for instance. We currently have a workflow where an admin user can place sensors in…

  • For those of you who (like me) missed this year's in-person DevDays – or perhaps have colleagues who would benefit from seeing sessions you managed to attend yourself in Las Vegas or elsewhere – you'll be interested to hear that DevDays Online will be disseminating all that DevDays goodness over the wire during the month of February. The great news is that this isn't being limited to ADN members: anyone can sign up and attend. The sessions will also be recorded, in case any are at times that don't work for you. You can register to attend the various sessions…

  • It's been a hectic – but very fun – few days in Munich, working with a group of 60-70 developers from all over Europe who are getting started with Autodesk's cloud services. I'm particularly focused on those working with AutoCAD I/O, which means probably 5-6 companies  in total. Here's a quick summary of some of the problems that have come up, many of which are for pure AutoCAD… Draw Order warning One developer has a long-running custom operation that presents the following message: AutoCAD Warning: This operation may take a long time. To greatly improve performance, the system can disregard…

  • With the clock ticking before next week's AU 2015, here's the second of my class handouts (here's a link to the first). For those of you lucky enough to be heading to this year's event, see you in Vegas!   Introduction During the course of this session, we're going to look at the steps required to implement a web-site for turning pictures into jigsaw puzzles. We're not going to go quite as far as creating the puzzles, themselves, but rather the DWG or DWF files that can be used to drive a laser cutter to do the work. The premise…

  • Last night, I left the (very fun) party at the X Summit a little early: partly because I knew I was presenting this morning and needed a clear head, but mainly to attend a WebVR meet-up being held at Mozilla. I'm rarely in the Bay Area and it seemed a shame to miss the opportunity to attend the event, especially as it was a chance to hang out with Jim Quanci and Goran Borjesson, a colleague visiting from Gothenberg. I'll describe my experiences of the evening's proceedings, but you can also watch the online recording. It was really an interesting…

  •   The AutoCAD I/O team has deployed version 2 of their API. For specific information on what's new, check this page. As I'll be talking about AutoCAD I/O at AU 2015, I thought it important to get to grips with the new version and understand how it differs from v1. I went ahead and updated Jigsawify.com to make use of the new API, so I'll add my own commentary below on the changes that have been introduced. As a reminder, the full source code for Jigsawify.com is available on GitHub. To check out the specific migration changes, see this comparison…

  • We're about halfway through the first Cloud Accelerator Extension being held in the incredible city of Prague. The entire European ADN team is in town – so a great chance to catch up with old friends such as Jeremy, Adam, Philippe, Cyrille and Peter – along with cloud-focused developers from Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Romania, Italy, Greece, Israel and (of course) the Czech Republic. So definitely making new friends, too. 🙂 I'm mainly here to help developers working with AutoCAD I/O – gathering feedback for the development team, in the process – and it's really great…

  • I'll be in Prague – with Adam Nagy from the ADN team – on Tuesday of next week (from 6 to 9pm on September 8, 2015) to talk to people about Autodesk's horizontal PaaS offerings, notably the AutoCAD I/O and View & Data web services. If you happen to be in the area and are interested in attending, please sign up and come on by the Autodesk Prague office on Tuesday evening! From my side I'm going to talk about the implementation details relating to the use of Autodesk web services in Jigsawify and Vrok-It. It should be a fun…

  • After building a web-site to create files that help make laser-cuttable jigsaws, it made sense to actually go ahead and cut some. In the flesh, so to speak. My initial findings weren't good: I'd assumed that I could output 2D solids from AutoCAD – each representing a pixel to be engraved on the jigsaw – and that the laser cutting software (in our case LaserCut 5.3) would at least see the boundaries. But nothing at all loaded – apart from the cutting geometry for the pieces, of course. In fairness, the question has come up a few times as to…