AutoCAD
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This is the third part of the series documenting my recent interview with John Walker. Where the first part looked at the early history of the company and the second looked at the architectural evolution of AutoCAD and its APIs, this part focuses on Autodesk's business strategy and focus on its eco-system. I have not […]
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The following question came in as a comment on this previous post: Your example above shows how to create a property type filter, how do you add layers to a group type filter (LayerGroup class)? I can create the group filter but can't figure out how to add layers to the group. The filterexpression method […]
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This is the second part of the series documenting my recent interview with John Walker. Where the first part looked at the early history of the company, this part focuses more on the architectural evolution of AutoCAD and its APIs. I have not linked to terms previously linked to in the first part of the […]
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The question of how to perform a "NETLOAD" programmatically has come in a few times. Well, it turns out the answer - provided by someone in our Engineering team - is refreshingly simple. The NETLOAD command actually has a bare-bones implementation: the hard work of parsing the metadata defining commands etc. is done from an […]
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I'm still a little frazzled after transcribing the 18,000 word interview with John Walker (and largely with two fingers - at such times the fact that I've never learned to touch-type is a significant cause of frustration, as you might imagine). I'm also attending meetings all this coming week, so I've gone for the cheap […]
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On Thursday of last week (September 4th, 2008, for those people accessing this post sometime in the distant future :-), I had the great honour of meeting with John Walker, one of Autodesk's founders and its former CEO. I've known for some time that John lives in the Neuchâtel area, and it turns out he […]
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This is an interesting one that came up recently during an internal discussion: During my module's Initialize() function, I want to decide that the module should not actually be loaded. How can I accomplish that? The answer is surprisingly simple: if you throw an exception during the function, AutoCAD's NETLOAD mechanism will stop loading the […]
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Since posting three different options for Zooming to a Window or Entity inside AutoCAD, I've had a few discussions with a developer on how best to implement this cleanly. The requirement is to change the AutoCAD view via a smooth view transition (currently not exposed via any kind of view-modification API, only via the ZOOM […]
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This just may be the catalyst I needed to get around to installing Visual Studio 2008: the availability of the F# September 2008 Community Technology Preview. This takes F# an important step closer to being a full .NET citizen, with the first release delivered by Microsoft's Developer Division (the previous releases having been delivered by […]
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In a recent webcast, Gopinath Taget, from our DevTech Americas team, showed how to use the Brep API from a .NET application: something that was made possible in AutoCAD 2009. The Brep API in AutoCAD allows you to traverse the boundary representation of a Solid3d object. Without going into specifics - as this isn't really […]