ObjectARX
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This is a minor pet peeve of mine that I felt like sharing. Feel free to post a comment if you agree, disagree or have your own pet coding peeve to share with other readers of this blog. I quite often see .NET code that tests for the value of a Boolean to see whether it's true or false: if (booleanVariable == true) { … } or If isBooleanFunction() = False Then … End If Now while not strictly incorrect, this style is, at least, redundant: a Boolean is by nature true or false, and testing for equality…
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This is a really fun one: a new technology preview on Autodesk Labs that integrates powerful sketching – such as that available in SketchBook Pro and SketchBook Mobile (both of which I've played around with, at one point or another) – into AutoCAD 2010. Now it's not immediately apparent what the benefits are for having this kind of sketching integrated directly into AutoCAD, but for sure it saves application switching and is likely to make it easier to share marked-up models. The first thing I did was to install the application: To sketch you need to be in a layout,…
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Next week Fenton Webb, from DevTech Americas, will be presenting a free webcast on the 3D capabilities of AutoCAD's APIs. Here's Fenton's synopsis: "If your product has always been 2D and you are now considering moving to 3D or if you are simply interested in finding out about the different API's that are available to program AutoCAD in 3D then come join this webcast. We'll give a brief overview history of 3D in AutoCAD along with some code demonstrations of some API's in operation. Also, don't forget that included at the end is a Q and A section allowing you…
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It's that time of year again (it's actually a little later than when we published these surveys last year, but still). The following "Summer 2009" API wishlist surveys are now ready: AutoCAD® AutoCAD® Civil 3D® Revit® Autodesk® Inventor® Please do take the time to fill out the surveys for the products you customize or develop applications for. Our Engineering teams use the feedback you provide to prioritise our API development efforts: this is a great chance for you to have a direct impact on the direction we take in exposing APIs from our products. And if you (optionally) provide your…
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Sorry if the title is a little abrupt, but it seemed too good an opportunity to show off my now appalling poetry skills. [Something almost no-one knows (well, OK, knew) about me is that, at the age of 8, I was the youngest winner of a poetry competition. I went along to the King's Lynn Arts Centre (known back then as The Fermoy Centre) to recite my poem, "Words Inside my Pencil", to a packed – at least it seemed so, at the time – audience of the various winners' parents. Anyway, as you can see it was all downhill…
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In the last post we looked at the code behind an ObjectARX module exposing AutoCAD's Properties Palette for use from managed .NET languages. Thanks again to Cyrille Fauvel for providing this implementation. In this post we're going to move right onto using this implementation from C#. First things first: if you didn't understand much of what was said in the previous post in this series, Don't Panic! (Yes, that's a quick reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) The actual implementation details aren't particularly important - you only really need to understand them if you want to expose additional…
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A huge thanks to Cyrille Fauvel, who manages DevTech's Media & Entertainment team but still finds the time to dip into the odd deeply-technical, AutoCAD-related issue. Cyrille provided the original article on this topic late last year, but it's taken me time to get around to editing and publishing it. A quick tip... if you're not interested in the technical details of how Cyrille has exposed the various Properties Palette interfaces to .NET, you can safely skip this post and join us again when we go ahead and make use of the implementation to add dynamic properties to core AutoCAD…
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As many of you are probably aware, my team (DevTech) is involved in a number of activities around the APIs to Autodesk products: we talk about them at conferences and seminars (what we tend to call "evangelism"), we provide API training, support & consulting, and we also develop content to publish via blogs and the Autodesk Developer Network website. One activity of which people may not be aware is the work we do around development tools: one very good example is the ObjectARX Wizard that ships on the ObjectARX SDK and helps C++ developers build applications and use various ObjectARX…
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This is the second post in the series looking at the new APIs in AutoCAD 2010, and following on from this post. I've copied the information in this post from the recently-published Platform Technologies Customization Newsletter, a quarterly newsletter available to ADN members. A big thank you to Stephen Preston, Fenton Webb and Gopinath Taget for putting the material together. Parametric Drawing API If you know Inventor® software products, then this feature will seem strangely familiar :-). Using the same solver engine as Inventor, and closely following the Inventor parametric design user interface, the AutoCAD 2010 Parametric Drawing feature is…
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This post looks at the basic steps required to prepare your application to work with AutoCAD 2010. I've copied the information from the recently-published Platform Technologies Customization Newsletter, a quarterly newsletter available to ADN members. A big thank you to Stephen Preston, Fenton Webb and Gopinath Taget for putting the material together. AutoCAD 2010 software release marks the end of a binary compatibility cycle. Remember the migration from AutoCAD 2004/5/6 to AutoCAD 2007? Don't worry – this time is a lot easier. And now you have another three years of compatibility to look forward to. The major migration issues are:…