AutoCAD
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On my flight back from Singapore I started thinking about how an app might help people discover what's new in the AutoCAD UI from release to release. This might also work for custom functionality, but that's not (currently) my main concern. I was thinking of displaying some kind of palette that cycles through the new commands and features in a release, highlighting the associated ribbon buttons, etc., using the AutoCAD help system's excellent UI Finder capability. Over the weekend I started looking at how it might work – whether it was possible to call the UI Finder from an app…
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The countdown for Autodesk University 2015 starts with the Call for Proposals opening on April 22nd. It will remain open until May 26th. I have a few ideas for possible topics to present at this year's event… Virtual Reality using Autodesk's View & Data API Developing JavaScript applications for AutoCAD using TypeScript Processing drawings in the cloud using AutoCAD I/O They all seem to be valid topics, but we'll see if I can find the energy and motivation to submit all three. If you have an opinion on what you'd like to hear me talk about – even if you…
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Back when FARO announced their new Freestyle3D handheld scanner, I contacted them to see whether they might have one for me to take a look at. They very kindly obliged, and a few weeks ago I received a loaner model in the post. I won't be writing an exhaustive review – at least not in this post – but I did want to share my first impressions, mainly to capture them for future discussion. Bear in mind that most of what I'm writing here is personal opinion and the rest is pure speculation :-). Hopefully someone at FARO will be…
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A little while ago you may remember an HTML progress meter I created while looking at "future API features". The API feature in question was of course for AutoCAD 2016, and related to the extraction of floorplans programmatically using .NET, a topic we're covering in today's post. We're going to see some fairly basic code that asks AutoCAD to analyse a point cloud – that we're going to attach from an RCS or RCP file – and generate polyline boundaries for its floorplan. Now I didn't actually have a great point cloud to test this, so I ended up using…
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I'm making the most of a late flurry of snow in the alps, this week, finishing up the winter season on the slopes with my family. And I'm going from the snow to the sun next week, as I head across to Singapore for some internal planning meetings. I do expect to blog pretty much as usual, during the course of these two weeks, though (I've still got too much to talk about regarding AutoCAD 2016, for one thing). A topic that I wanted to share today is regarding a MOOC I'm currently following via edX. It started last week…
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Last week we introduced the ExecuteInCommandContextAsync() method and saw it in action from a context menu click event. In today's post we're going to see how it can be used for a lot more: we're going to use it to respond to external, operating system-level events (although admittedly we're handling the event in-process to AutoCAD via .NET). What we're actually going to do is fire off a command inside AutoCAD – in our case we're going to use RECTANG to create square polylines – each time we find that a file has been placed in a particular folder (in our…
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Some time ago we posted the NuGet packages for AutoCAD 2015's .NET API. The packages for AutoCAD 2016 are now live, too. Here's the report from the NuGet console (accessible in Visual Studio via Tools –> NuGet Package Manager –> Package Manager Console). PM> Get-Package -filter AutoCAD.NET -ListAvailable Id Version Description/Release Notes -- ------- ------------------------- AutoCAD.NET 20.1.0 AutoCAD 2016 API AutoCAD.NET.Core 20.1.0 AutoCAD 2016 core object model API AutoCAD.NET.Model 20.1.0 AutoCAD 2016 drawing object model API To install the 2016 versions of the assemblies into your project, you can use the following command, once again in the NuGet Console.…
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It's time to start looking in more detail at some of the new API capabilities in AutoCAD 2016. To give you a sense of what to expect in terms of a timeline, this week we'll look at a couple of uses for DocumentCollection.ExecuteInCommandContextAsync() and next week we'll look at point cloud floorplan extraction and (hopefully) security and signing. The first use of ExecuteInCommandContextAsync() I wanted to highlight was one raised in a blog comment a couple of months ago. The idea is simple enough: we want to be able to launch a command reliably from an event handler, in our…
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After our quick look at AutoCAD 2016 from a user perspective, let's now spend some time looking at the things important to developers in this latest release. Compatibility Off the bat it's worth stating that AutoCAD 2016 is a DWG compatible release: it's using the same file format as AutoCAD 2013, 2014 and 2015. It's also a binary application compatible release: ObjectARX apps written for AutoCAD 2015 should work in 2016 and it's likely that .NET apps built for AutoCAD 2014 will work, too. That said, some changes have been made to the security model for this release of AutoCAD,…
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It's that time again! Over the coming days you're going to be hearing lots about the next release of AutoCAD, codenamed "Maestro". Before taking a look at AutoCAD 2016 from a developer's perspective – which we'll do next time – in this post we're going to take a quick look at its user features. To kick things off here are the new commands and system variables, here are those that have changed and here are those that have been removed. To cherry-pick from the top of the new commands list, CLOSEALLOTHER will close all open drawings other than the one…