Plugin of the Month
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This request came in over the weekend: There is a useful object snap in AutoCAD for the mid point of 2 selected points. I would like a midpoint (average) of 3 (or more) points. Could this work in 3D as well as 2D? It's useful when drawing building surveys, often you triangulate a point from several and there are often 'minimal' differences in the dimension and you just take the average. Given the fact we're actually talking about an arbitrary number of points that will almost certainly not belong to a single entity, object snaps are probably neither the easiest…
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I owe Chris Kratz a huge thanks for inspiring me to do more with LINQ. This post uses LINQ to provide more elegant solutions to a couple of problems described in previous posts. The code in today's post is probably my second brief foray into the world of LINQ. The comments Chris posted on the last post prompted me to spend a little time looking at LINQ over the weekend, and I really like it. I'd heard before that "LINQ is really just functional programming", and in many ways I see that more clearly now, myself: the set of higher-order…
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As Scott has announced over on his blog, January's Plugin of the Month, DrawOrder By Layer, is now available on Autodesk Labs. I first posted the code for this very useful plugin back in October, and this version includes only a very minor change from that one (for performance reasons it now only works with modelspace layers). A huge thanks to Terry Dotson from DotSoft for generously donating this plugin. After the original post, a few people provided feedback on user interface enhancements they'd like to see in the tool – thanks for taking the time to do so, those…
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As many of you may now be aware, much of the content recorded at this year's Autodesk University is now available on the AU website. You'll find the recording of my AU Virtual session, "Getting to Know the AutoCAD® Plug-ins of the Month", as well as material from the two physical sessions I presented, "Point Clouds on a Shoestring" and "Integrate F# into Your C# or VB.NET Application for an 8x Performance Boost". In fact, much to my surprise, the "Point Clouds on a Shoestring" session (which turned out to be my highest-rated session) ended up being recorded, and can…
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As promised and reported on, and then announced by Scott on his blog, the QR Codes application for AutoCAD is now live on Autodesk Labs as December's Plugin of the Month. You may have seen my original implementation, but it's come a long way thanks to the efforts of Augusto Gonçalves, a member of DevTech based in São Paulo. While I had developed the original implementation to create and embed raster images using the Google Chart API, Augusto extended that implementation to create native hatches for QR Codes. And while my implementation focused on a command-line UI, Augusto implemented a…
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It was a bit of a schlep, but I got here. My flight out of Geneva was delayed due to inclement weather: the first (actually quite mild) snowstorm of the season. The runway was closed for some time and there was a 1+-hour backlog on de-icing, so I sat helplessly watching my connection time in Heathrow dissipate to nothing. In the end, after a 3-hour delay, this initial flight arrived 5 minutes after my direct connection to Las Vegas had left. I had the choice of waiting a full 24-hours – as BA fly once a day direct to Las…
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This handout is for the companion class to the one whose handout formed my last post. While that class was user-focused, this one, "CP322-2 - Integrate F# into Your C# or VB.NET Application for an 8x Performance Boost", is more developer-focused and takes the hood off the implementation of the BrowsePhotosynth application. The code for this special version of the application – which imports synchronously via C# and synchronously/asynchronously via F# – is available here for download. Introduction This class takes a look at the implementation of BrowsePhotosynth for AutoCAD, the ADN Plugin of the Month from October 2010 and…
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I spent more time than I wanted tunneling down a rabbit-hole, today. Thankfully I really didn't have a great deal of time to focus on the problem at hand, otherwise I might have spent even more time down there. But perhaps the time wasn't all wasted – at least I've made a blog post out of it, even if it's mainly to vent my frustration. 🙂 I started – on a positive note – by fixing the focus issues when certain uses of the Clipboard Manager result in AutoCAD not having focus (presumably the palette has it, instead): P/Invoking the…
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I've made a couple of updates to the Clipboard Manager in this latest version. Firstly I wanted to remove a peculiar situation that occurred in the previous versions when you copy something to the clipboard that isn't AutoCAD geometry: for some reason this act invalidates the ability to access data – such as the preview images – from the items in the Clipboard Manager. The pasting into the drawing still works, as setting an AutoCAD object back onto the clipboard re-enables access to AutoCAD data. You can try this with the previous version by creating a number of entries on…
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As mentioned previously, Viru Aithal, from DevTech India, has been working hard on a replacement for the venerable ScriptPro tool. I'm delighted to say that it's now ready, and is live on Autodesk Labs as November's Plugin of the Month. Viru took the codebase he developed for the DWF/PDF Batch Publish tool and created ScriptPro 2.0, written from the ground up in C# and developed without any dependency on a specific AutoCAD version. Viru's approach uses the equivalent of late binding to call into AutoCAD through COM and so doesn't require a specific AutoCAD Type Library. Which means the tool…