AutoCAD
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As mentioned in this previous post, today I'm hosting a live Facecast on AutoCAD Customization. If you're free for 30 minutes at this time, please do drop by and watch the show: Watch live streaming video from autocad at livestream.com [This viewer will show the current contents of the AutoCAD Facecast stream. Once other Facecasts have been delivered, they'll supersede mine in this viewing window.] And I'm still open for questions posted as comments or submitted via email, of course. Speak to you later. π
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In this previous post we introduced a technique for automatically translating AutoCAD's tooltips into one of 35 different languages via an online translation service. To improve the process at various levels β rendering it more efficient and enabling the possibility of local editing and crowdsourced localization β this post introduces caching of the translation results to a set of local XML files. A few comments on the implementation changes: There's now a TRANSTIPSSRC command, which allows you to set the source language (using a similar UI to the target language). This is useful if you're working on non-English AutoCAD (our…
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I'll be delivering a Facecast on AutoCAD Customization next Tuesday, July 19th 2011 at 5pm CET / 8am PST. If you'd like to attend, please RSVP via this Facebook page. The timing on the page seems to be for 3 hours, but I've been told the session will last around 30 minutes. I'll embed a viewer onto the Facecast β for people to watch live and after the fact β inside a blog post on Tuesday, so you can also just come here, then. If you need some help working out the time of the session in your location, I…
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One of the great benefits I have from working in our NeuchΓ’tel office is my proximity to a great many talented members of Autodesk's Worldwide Localization team, who are responsible for translating most of our products into various languages. Over the last few months, I've been working even more closely than usual with that team, mainly looking at ways Autodesk might broaden the ability to localize our software. A couple of hot topics are of particular interest, these days, in the world of localization: machine translation and crowdsourcing. The implementation I'll be showing over the next few posts actually hits…
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To continue on the theme established in the last post, today we're going to go ahead and modify AutoCAD tooltips, prefixing them with a fixed string. This is the next step on the path to modifying them in a more meaningful way (to translate them into a different language, for instance). Here's some C# code that implements a command to prefix all AutoCAD tooltips with a silly string ("Kean says this command β¦"): using Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Windows.Controls; using System.Windows; namespace PrefixTooltips { public class Commands { List<string> _handled = null;…
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I'm working on an internal project that seems to be worth sharing externally. I'm looking at the potential for run-time modification (thinking mainly about translation) of tooltips displayed by AutoCAD. The first step towards realising this is clearly to determine when tooltips are going to be displayed and to establish the content of these tooltips. Here's some C# code that does this (written with Visual Studio 2010, so users of prior versions may need to swap out my lambda function for a delegate or even a full event-handler function). You'll also need to include AdWindows.dll in addition to the typical…
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Today's post contains some fun code contributed by Stephen Preston which re-creates the Minesweeper video game inside AutoCAD. Stephen tells me it needs a bit of polishing, but the game is certainly playable. I've reformatted some of Stephen's code to fit this blog. The implementation comprises two main files, which you can name as you wish. I've used the VS 2010 convention for line-breaks (which means you don't need an underscore). If you're using older versions of Visual Sudio or Visual Basic Express you may need to concatenate lines or insert underscores at the end of them. Here's the main…
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Better information when debugging .NET and ObjectARX applications has been a long-standing request from our developer community. I'm happy to say that this week we've posted a set of public debugging symbols (in the form of stripped PDB files) to our new corporate symbol server, http://symbols.autodesk.com/symbols. For now' we've posted the 32- and 64-bit PDBs for AutoCAD 2012, and will continue to update them with symbols for our public releases. Before going too much further, it's worth looking at some background information on debugging symbols and how to make use of a symbol server from Visual Studio. Now let's look…
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I've been planning to look at it for ages β and have certainly mentioned it before β but other things have kept on cropping up. Well last Thursday, on my train trip back from Wallisellen (the home of Microsoft Switzerland), I finally managed to take the plunge and start working with the Async CTP for Visual Studio 2010. I'd been in Wallisellen to attend an MSDN TechTalk presentation by Stephen Toub, Principal Architect on Microsoft's Parallel Computing Platform team. I've followed Stephen via his blog β and the Parallel Programming with .NET blog β for a long time, and thought…
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Another Friday, another installment of Wayne Brill's AutoCAD .NET training DevTV series (to complement those sessions from previous weeks). Today's session is focused user-interface elements such as the .NET attributes for exposing commands and optimizing loading, adding your own tab to the options dialog and implementing drag & drop. This series of DevTV sessions is a companion for the new AutoCAD .NET training material available from the AutoCAD .NET Developer Center. Enjoy! π