AutoCAD .NET


  • May’s Plugin of the Month: Spiro for AutoCAD

    This one is a bit of an experiment: our first "fun" Plugin of the Month (fun in that it doesn't serve a serious work-related purpose that I can think of :-). I've post earlier versions of the code to this blog, but thought I'd post and share the latest & greatest. Scott has kindly announced the plugin's availability already over on It's Alive in the Lab. This is our first Plugin on the Month written in F#, which means an additional DLL needs to be copied with the plugin itself. Other than that the application should work just as if…


  • Importing Photosynth point clouds into AutoCAD 2011 – Part 4

    In the previous posts in this series we introduced a command that downloaded and imported point clouds from Photosynth.net, we introduced a WinForms user interface on top of it and then replaced that UI with one implemented using WPF. As threatened last time, we're now going to make some efficiency improvements in the original command implementation. In our previous implementation we were blindly asking for files, one after the other, and using failure to indicate when we'd reached the end. Which was fine, but it limited us in a few ways: we could not reliably parallelize this otherwise highly parallelizable…


  • "AutoCAD 2011 New APIs" webcast recording

    The recording of the previously announced "AutoCAD 2011 New APIs" webcast held on April 13th, 2010 is now available for download (19.8MB). We've also completed a much-needed restructuring of our online session information. Links to downloads of previously recorded sessions were available via our API training schedule (also available from http://autodesk.com/apitraining –> Schedule). They have now been granted their own, well-deserved page: [You'll notice the recording of the Inventor 2011 New APIs is also live – the Revit 2011 version will be posted soon, as will the one for AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011 (once the session has been held, of…


  • Hitting breakpoints in .NET Class Libraries while debugging with Visual Studio 2010

    This question has popped up a few times since Visual Studio 2010's recent launch. I received it by email overnight from Roland Cox, which is interesting as I'd already planned this post for today. Do you know how to debug AutoCAD and a custom add in using Visual Studio 2010? What settings do I need to make?  I know the add is getting loaded (the code runs in AutoCAD) but I can't set a breakpoint (it shows a empty circle saying that VS doesn't have the assembly loaded). I first saw this issue raised a few times on threads with…


  • Importing Photosynth point clouds into AutoCAD 2011 - Part 3

    As alluded to in the last post in this series (ignoring a related post that dealt with user interface integration) I wasn't really happy with some of the tricks I needed in the WinForms version to try and make a coherent user interface for tracking accessed point clouds in a hosted Photosynth browsing session. This post replaces the WinForms UI with one implemented using WPF, and in fact might also have been titled "Using data-binding in WPF to track a list of objects with associated thumbnails" or something to that effect. 🙂 What I've done in the new version of…


  • Translated AutoCAD VBA to VB.NET Migration DevTVs

    To help people who don't master English with their efforts to migrate their code from VBA to VB.NET, my team has been busy translating our existing AutoCAD VBA to VB.NET Migration Basics DevTV session into other languages. Here are the languages we have, so far (including an updated English version): English view download (44.7 MB) Chinese view download (88.9 MB) French view download (39 MB) Portuguese view download (80.3 MB) Russian view download (39.3 MB) A big thanks to Augusto Gonçalves, Xiaodong Liang, Philippe Leefsma and Marat Mirgaleev for their hard work on these sessions. German and Spanish versions should…


  • April's plugin of the Month: XrefStates for AutoCAD

    Yes, I know, I know – we're halfway through the month, already. This plugin has been live on Autodesk Labs since the beginning of the month, but I've been a little distracted by April Fools' jokes, fooling around with Photosynth point clouds as well as finishing up some internal activities which always tend to take time away from blogging at this time of year. Anyway, I've been remiss talking about this very cool application, but at least Scott was there to announce it on day one. The application was developed by Glenn Ryan, and there are a number of notable…


  • Adding to AutoCAD’s Application Menu and Quick Access Toolbar using .NET

    I received this question from Vikas Hajela a few days ago: I am developing a plugin in C#, which will add a link in Quick Access Toolbar in AutoCAD. […] My problem is that I don't know how to add a link into existing Quick Access Toolbar and Menu Bar in AutoCAD using ObjectARX SDK and C#. Also I want that on click of that link it should open a new window. We're going to look at some code that – on initialization of the application – adds an item to AutoCAD's "Big A" Application Menu and to the Quick…


  • Importing Photosynth point clouds into AutoCAD 2011 - Part 2

    In the last post we looked at a command to allow importing of Photosynth point clouds into AutoCAD. In this post we'll put a GUI on the front end, to avoid people having to sniff network traffic to determine the location of the appropriate files on the Photosynth servers. The application is actually relative simple: it hosts a browser control that gets pointed at the Photosynth web-site, allowing the user to browse through Photosynths. As point clouds are detected (as the browser has some handy events notifying of the HTTP traffic generated by the embedded Photosynth application, and we know…


  • Importing Photosynth point clouds into AutoCAD 2011 - Part 1

    For some background into what this series is all about, see this previous post. I've been tracking Photosynth for some time, but only recently became aware of its use of point-clouds on the back-end and the possibility of extracting this information from the site. I first got inspired by Binary Millenium's video of the process they've used along with the Python script they've provided on their website to extract the points from a Photosynth point cloud file. I converted this code to C# (without realising there was already a version out there – I should really have done better research,…