AutoCAD
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As mentioned, last week, I'm going to be hanging out in the AutoCAD .NET forum for the next few hours. I'll try to do a little live blogging here… so check back often. And remember to join me in the Google Hangout! 15:10 CEST / 6:10 PDT Sitting here with at Autodesk Neuchatel with Celine and Camilo (aka ^CEL and ^CAM from AutodeskHelp), waiting for the questions to come in. 16:50 CEST / 7:50 PDT Well, the Hangout was interesting. On the one hand, I didn't realise you had to enable Q&A before launching the "Hangout On Air", but…
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One year ago Autodesk held our first ever Answer Day for people to get answers regarding the use of AutoCAD (and its APIs). While I didn't participate in the original event, myself, I was pleased to see a new approach being tried for connecting users of our products with the people who create them. You can think of these Answer Days as a kind of AMA for Autodesk software. The original event paved the way for several others and all have proven to be worthwhile: not just for Autodesk customers struggling with frustrating probems but for the Autodesk employees who…
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I decided to dust off Visual Studio and write a quick AutoCAD app, this morning. It tackles a question received via a blog comment from Pankaj Potdar, over the weekend. I have two blocks with different attributes I want to merge them in single block, and I don't want to create any nested blocks. I haven't had much time to spend on AutoCAD, of late. Part of the reason has been work-related: I'm heads-down getting the VR/AR track in shape for the upcoming Forge DevCon, as well as spending time on new duties in Autodesk Research. The other part is…
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The AutoCAD team is running their annual survey to better understand developers' needs relating to documentation. Access the survey here before the end of May. Lee Ambrosius provides more information over on his blog, including some interesting data-points from last year's survey as well as areas of the documentation that were influenced by it.
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Yesterday Autodesk announced the availability of AutoCAD 2017, code-named "Nautilus". We use consecutive letters in the alphabet for AutoCAD code names, and as 2016 was "Maestro" it's natural that 2017 would begin with an N. For those of you who're wondering, the code name is indeed a reference to the graphics used for the AutoCAD R12 product. Here's my R12 AutoLISP reference, where you can see the inspiration… To find out what's new in AutoCAD 2017 from a product perspective, head on over to Heidi Hewett's post on the AutoCAD blog or visit autodesk.com. You can also watch Mike Mizuno's…
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After seeing a basic approach to sort arrays of ObjectIds using LINQ – and then refactoring that to be a shared extension method to be used on arrays of ObjectIds – today we're going to see that code refactored, once again, to work with types of data other than strings (up until now we could only sort objects based on string properties such as class and layer names). One solid approach for creating operations that can deal with different types of object – while maintaining type safety – is to use template classes, which are known as generic classes in…
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In the last post we took a look at one technique to sort a list of ObjectIds by the associated objects' layer and type. In this post we're going to refactor the commonality to have a single extension method that allows us to sort a list of ObjectIds based on any string property. Here's the updated C# code: using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.DatabaseServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; namespace ProcessObjectsInOrder { public static class Extensions { /// <summary> /// Sorts an array of ObjectIds based on a string property and order.…
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I received this interesting question by email from Henrik Ericson, last week. Is it possible to sort the selected objects (only 3dFaces in my case) in a SelectionSet by their layers? I want to process all the objects, one layer at a time. In other words, first all objects on layer A, and then all objects on layer B and then C and so on. In my case it isn't necessary to process the layers alphabetically. It's especially interesting as I'd just been thinking of approaches for sorting toolbars based on an index property, to get the code in this…
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I wasn't planning on posting to this blog again, this week – three times per week is enough, I find, so I tend to save any leftovers for the week after – but this question James Maeding asked is very much related to this week's posts, and – in any case – I already have three fun posts planned for next week. 🙂 Here's the question James asked, again: wish I had something to make tooltips disappear when needed. I like them on for many things, but then they get in the way sometimes, and you have to cancel all…
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In the first post in this series, we saw how to disable AutoCAD's ribbon. In the second post, we saw how to make (with some caveats) AutoCAD's toolbars disappear. In this post we're going to throw all that away and show how to get better results with a single line of code. <sigh> But before all that, a big "thanks" to both James Meading and Alexander Rivilis, who have helped us get to this point. James pointed out a fairly significant flaw in yesterday's toolbar-hiding code (hence the mention of caveats, above), in that it didn't place toolbars on multiple…