AutoCAD
-
This week I'm going to posting a few topics related to F#, as it feels as though I've been neglecting it, of late. And as this technology is going to hit the mainstream very soon – when Visual Studio 2010 ships – it seems all the more important to keep one's F# skills honed. We're going to start the week with an F# equivalent to the code shown in this previous post, where we go through and reflect on the commands exposed by an assembly in order to create corresponding demand-loading Registry keys automatically. We've shipped VB.NET and C# versions…
-
After my initial fooling around with turning AutoCAD into a Spirograph using F#, I decided to come back to this and bolt a jig on the front to make the act of making these objects more visual and discoverable. The process was quite interesting – I'd created jigs from Python and Ruby, but not from F#, so this was a first for me. It's also a multi-stage jig, which is fun: we acquire the outer radius of the pattern followed by the radius of the smaller circle and the distance of the pen from the smaller circle's center. At each…
-
I'm very pleased to announce the availability of this really interesting Plugin of the Month over on Autodesk Labs: Batch Publish for AutoCAD. Here's an excerpt from the ReadMe (which I happen to have written, but anyway): This plugin can be used with AutoCAD to simplify the process of publishing sets of drawings to DWF and/or PDF. It runs as a command within AutoCAD – as opposed to a separate executable – and uses a separate executable to monitor AutoCAD's health and restart it, as needed. The status of the batch publishing operation is stored to disk, allowing it to…
-
We've had a few reports from people implementing external .NET applications to drive AutoCAD – as shown in this previous post – experiencing intermittent failures once AutoCAD 2010 Update 1 has been applied. Here's a typical error message: It contains the text "Problem executing component: Call was rejected by callee. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80010001 (RPC_E_CALL_REJECTED))" (to help people Googling this error message :-). This "problem" was introduced as we addressed an issue with the way our WPF components in AutoCAD handle inbound messages, largely due to Microsoft's decision not to support nested message loops in WPF. If WPF is in…
-
After one update to the content he originally posted, Stephen Preston has handed the reigns for this DevTV across to Augusto Gonçalves, a São Paulo-based member of our DevTech Americas team. Augusto presented his work to rave reviews at AU 2009, and has now updated the online DevTV content. I've gone ahead and updated the original post to point to this new content, but here are the links, for your convenience: AutoCAD VBA to VB.NET Migration Basics view download (44.7 Mb) Aside from upgrading the presenter (sorry, Stephen – I couldn't resist 😉 we've made some additional enhancements in this…
-
I received a really intriguing question by email from Dave Wolfe on Friday afternoon: Due to your post on the topic, I wanted to improve my installation method for .Net modules. While examining the topic, I ran into a few concerns that shaped my development process. The game changer is that I couldn't find a way to use reflection to check a .net module for the CommandMethodAttributes without being in an AutoCAD session. The CommandMethodAttribute crashes on initialization outside of AutoCAD. Dave went on to describe a couple of ways he'd found to work around this problem by driving AutoCAD,…
-
You may or may not be aware that my team, DevTech, writes and publishes DevNotes on the ADN website, answers support questions submitted by ADN members using a tool we call DevHelp Online, records DevTV sessions, participates in events known as DevLabs, talks about our upcoming products at DevDays and delivers API training. (Seems like we need to get the branding police to work on that last one. 🙂 So, in keeping with our theme we have started a new activity… I'm proud (and not unamused, which is putting it mildly) to announce our first DevCast. Recorded recently by Stephen…
-
Over the holiday season I bought myself an external 21.5" LCD multi-touch screen from Albatron. I'd been meaning to play around with multi-touch technology (on a full PC rather than a smartphone) and the arrival of Alias Sketch for AutoCAD 2010 on Autodesk Labs seemed like the perfect opportunity. AutoCAD doesn't currently have in-built multi-touch support – and therefore neither does the version of Alias Sketch that works inside it – but at least the single-touch capabilities of the screen would give me the chance to flex a few of my (admittedly somewhat atrophied) artistic muscles. To get started I…
-
A big thank you to Jim Cameron from Dematic for providing the code for this post, and to Wayne Brill from DevTech Americas who helped him on his way via ADN support. I've made a few changes of my own to the code, but the concept is very much Jim's. Jim recently had a frustrating problem with a VLX application he wrote that depends – via (vl-arx-import) – on a .NET module. It turns out the module was not being demand-loaded properly, but this took some time to diagnose. In the past Jim used (arx) from LISP to detect the…
-
I received this question by email from Vito Lee: I am trying to write an event handler function in C# and can use your expertise. I am trying to display an alert box whenever a user erases a specific block in a drawing. Which event handler would be best for this situation? This one is interesting, because it's quite a general problem and there are a few ways to solve it. To start with, let's generalise the problem description to cover watching for editing operations on drawing objects. We're indeed going to solve the specific problem stated above – albeit…