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Last week I was in Singapore for our annual, internal, two-day technical summit. Upwards of 500 members of Autodesk's various engineering and technical teams gathered together at the iconic Marina Bay Sands for the event. The hotel was pretty amazing. Having been told my room number (4619), I first exited the elevator at the 4th floor. It's only then that I realised the rooms on each floor were numbered in double digits, and so my room was on the 46th! While I didn't end up making much use of the hotel's facilities – aside from the conference centre, of course…
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As promised yesterday, this post deals with modifying your CRX module to make it work with AutoCAD I/O. A quick reminder on what writing a CRX app means for .NET developers: we're still creating a .DLL (unlike ObjectARX developers, whose CRX modules have the .crx extension), but it can only reference AcDbMgd.dll and AcCoreMgd.dll (not AcMgd.dll). Importantly the module must be loadable – and testable – in the Core Console. The basic C# code we're going to extend is from this previous post. The real change that's required for commands to work in AutoCAD I/O is how they get user-input…
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It's live! Our entry for the recent VR Hackathon in San Francisco has received a significant amount of spit and polish (OK, perhaps not the best mental image) over the last couple of weeks and is now ready for prime time (i.e. Beta testing ;-). Check it out at http://vrok.it! It should work well with Chrome, Firefox or Safari, although for best results I'd stick with Chrome on mobile devices. The term "vrok" is one I came up with on the trip back from San Francisco… it's a combination of an invented acronym – Virtual Reality Online Collaboration – and…
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The 2nd VR Hackathon, which took place in San Francisco over the weekend, was an absolute blast. It was held at Galvanize, a co-working space about a 15-minute walk from our 1 Market Street office. The venue was great: it had plenty of space but also with a fair amount of natural light (very important for those of us getting over our jetlag). There were fewer people at this second event – inevitably, as it happened over the Memorial Day weekend – but there was nonetheless a great energy in the room. At the core of our team – which…
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The title of this post is probably a bit misleading: I'm not actually going to show how this works, today, but I do intend to plot a path for addressing this topic over the coming weeks. I was spurred on by a tweet I received a couple of hours ago: @keanw Dear kean, I've been looking into AutoCAD I/O and it looks like it may only execute "scripts"; so no .NET API calls or LISP? — Cyborg (@CyborgEvilHam) May 13, 2015 The short answer to this is "yes, it's absolutely possible!". But readers of this blog are clearly interested in…
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A reminder that proposals are open for AU2015 until May 26th. I've just submitted two, myself. Of the three topics I had in mind – relating to VR, AutoCAD I/O and TypeScript – I decided to submit proposals on the first two: I'll do my best to use TypeScript for one or both of the other two (assuming they get accepted) which will at least give people some exposure to how the technology works. And give some good fodder for blog posts, of course. Here are the abstracts I submitted: Virtual Reality viewing of 3D models using Autodesk's View and…
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In the last post we looked at some simple JavaScript code to automate AutoCAD's UI Finder, locating a sequence of commands in the ribbon. In this post we're going to look at how to generate a more extensive list directly from AutoCAD's documentation. The first step I took was to download and install the offline help for AutoCAD 2016. This gives us a set of HTML and JavaScript files in a local folder (c:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2016 Help/English/Help on my system). To parse the files I ended up using some old-school UNIX commands via my OS X environment (which shares the…
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On my flight back from Singapore I started thinking about how an app might help people discover what's new in the AutoCAD UI from release to release. This might also work for custom functionality, but that's not (currently) my main concern. I was thinking of displaying some kind of palette that cycles through the new commands and features in a release, highlighting the associated ribbon buttons, etc., using the AutoCAD help system's excellent UI Finder capability. Over the weekend I started looking at how it might work – whether it was possible to call the UI Finder from an app…
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I'm excited to announce the newest member of the Autodesk product portfolio, Autodesk SoCap. The term "SoCap" stands for "Software Capture", in much the same way as ReCap stands for "Reality Capture". SoCap is a tool that helps you capture existing software behaviour as code, just as ReCap helps you capture a 3D scene as a point cloud. For SoCap to do its thing, you point it at the piece of software whose behaviour you want to capture – whether desktop software on Windows/Linux/OS X, mobile software targeting iOS/Android* or the URL of a cloud-based app – and SoCap will…
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After yesterday's fun with creating an HTML5-based progress meter for AutoCAD, today we're going to have some more fun styling it with CSS. To recap, here's the progress meter that comes "out of the box", with the default styling from Chromium on Windows. The first thing we need to do for our various changes is to use CSS to disable the default styling, at which point we can then use CSS to override it. progress { width: 100%; -webkit-appearance: none; } Here's how our progress meter looks when unstyled: Now that it's stripped bare, we can…