AutoCAD
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While debugging it's sometimes very frustrating to find yourself repeatedly stepping into an irrelevant function. For instance, complex statements pretty commonly include object constructors etc. that you know function perfectly well, but the debugger routinely takes you into them. The Visual Studio IDE has an undocumented (and unsupported) mechanism to help with this. During the […]
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I've been using Visual C++ (and afterwards Visual Studio) since it was 16-bit, back in version 1.52. OK, maybe that's not so long ago, relatively (11 short years), but the point is that in spite of having followed the Visual Studio technology over this period, I've so far been completely unaware of the autoexp.dat file. […]
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The work we did to migrate AutoCAD 2007 to use Unicode (rather than MBCS), has impacted many developers around the world. For those that are yet to go through the pain themselves, I thought I'd talk about the resources that are available to ObjectARX developers needing to port their applications to Unicode. Firstly, you should […]
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One of the really compelling features of .NET is its ability to call "legacy" unmanaged C++ APIs. I say "legacy", but we use this facility regularly to call APIs that are far from being considered defunct (the C++ version of ObjectARX is alive and kicking, believe me! :-). Autodesk understands that our development partners have […]
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Most of our desktop products support a "plug-in" model of development: you create a DLL (which may or may not be renamed with a number of extensions, such as DBX or ARX) which gets loaded into the calling executable's memory space. This allows the process to share memory with the loaded modules, improving performance over […]
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This topic was suggested by one of our ADN members - Paul Richardson, from CAD System Engineering - and answered by Cyrille Fauvel, from DevTech EMEA. So all I really had to do was copy/paste and some minor editing... now that's my kind of blogging. 🙂 The ObjectARX Wizard's installer targets the Microsoft Visual Studio […]
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To get started with writing a .NET app for AutoCAD, download the ObjectARX SDK for AutoCAD 2007. Contained within the samples/dotNet folder of the SDK are a number of helpful samples showing how to use various features of the managed API to AutoCAD. Incidentally, the project files etc. are generally saved in the version of […]
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The AutoCAD Engineering first prototyped a "managed" (for "managed" read ".NET") API for AutoCAD 2004. It was pretty revolutionary stuff at the time - a mixed-mode DLL was created to expose the managed interface and marshall these calls through to "unmanaged" ObjectARX calls. There were a number of reasons .NET was - and remains - […]
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This is a huge topic, so I'm not going to be able to do it justice in this one post. Applications developed using AutoCAD's APIs need to be tested (and sometimes ported) to make sure they work with a new release of the AutoCAD platform. For several generations of AutoCAD we have consciously chosen to […]
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I thought I'd mention one of the projects we're working on in DevTech right now. We're planning a webcast for later this year, to talk our developers through the various technologies Autodesk provides to create/access/view native DWG data and published DWF data. Here's the idea: we show the generation of native DWG data using AutoCAD […]