Plugin of the Month
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We have a number of candidate "Plugins of the Month" currently in the pipeline – including Inventor versions of Screenshot and Clipboard Manager as well as a tool to streamline batch plotting from AutoCAD – but unfortunately none were looking ready enough to count on for January's posting. So yesterday I dipped into the plugins that have generously been proposed/provided by external parties and I put together a C# version of a tool submitted by our old friend Jon Smith from COINS. Jon provided a number of C++ tools that COINS has made available for free, one of which was…
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Well, so far, so good! We had a great ADN session on Monday, before AU proper kicked off yesterday. Lots of opportunities to talk with old friends and new. It's always fun to find out what people are doing with our technology and hopefully to help address some of the snags they've hit along the way. Yesterday started with Albert Szilvasy's .NET 4.0 session, which showed some great techniques for implementing script execution in AutoCAD and tied in very well with the session I'm presenting today on IronPython and IronRuby. I then went off to record my AU Virtual session…
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A philosophical question regarding the Layer Reporter tool came up in a recent discussion with Tony Tanzillo. Tony suggested that using XML and XSLT would have been a better way to implement the tool, and in many ways I agree with him (I've been an advocate of XML for many years… during my interview to join Autodesk back in 1995 I presented a session on "Electronic Publishing Formats", which covered HTML generation from SGML – a pre-cursor to XML – and since then I've used XML regularly and on quite significant projects, such as during the redesign of the ADN…
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A comment on the code posted in the last post regarding the upcoming Plugin of the Month for the month of December, Layer Reporter, gave me some pause for thought. Tony Tanzillo suggested that making more complete use of the StringBuilder object – rather than direct string concatenation using "&" – would improve the performance of the plugin. As I mentioned in my own comment, Terry's original code did make heavier use of the StringBuilder, but while adjusting the HTML output to make it lighter-weight I introduced a number of string concatenation operations: looking back there were several that weren't…
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I feel like I'm posting a lot about our Plugin of the Month initiative, at the moment, but then I suppose it's to some degree a function of what I'm spending time on. It's definitely eating into the time I would normally focus on blogging… after a number of AU-related posts coming out over the next few weeks (as I finish my AU prep next week and then blog from the event the week after) I'd hope to return to somewhat more typical posts in December (although as I'm going on to Japan, Korea and China from Las Vegas, this…
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We've had a few reports of issues with the Screenshot "Plugin of the Month". They fall into two main categories: Attempting to NETLOAD the application DLL from a network share Within the ReadMe for each of the plugins we've documented that each application's DLL module should be copied to the local file system – preferably inside the AutoCAD Program Files folder – before being loaded by NETLOAD. We recommend this because it essentially stops users from hitting a whole category of .NET Framework-related problems when loading and running the plugins. If you didn't heed this advice then you'd probably find…
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Given the previous posts on this topic, I'd hope it's no great surprise to regular readers that this month's "Plugin of the Month" consists of a tool to simplify the capturing of screenshots within AutoCAD. This month's tool allows you to capture the current document, the entire application and an area of the drawing specified by the user or the extents of a set of objects, sending the results to a file or to the clipboard. It has optional settings to remap the background colour (which is useful for people working with a non-white background colour but who want to capture…
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Now that I'm completely finished with my AU 2009 preparation, it's time for me to get back to the next "Plugin of the Month", given that we have just a few days left of the month of October. Here's another iteration of the application, this time implementing the following enhancements: The application now keeps the chosen settings: they follow you between drawings and even between sessions. We now perform a Regen after selecting objects to capture to unhighlight them There is now a "Print" setting, which gives the option of sending the capture image directly to a printer The image…
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Thanks to all those who provided feedback on this recent post. I really appreciate people taking the time to provide feedback – both positive and negative – as I want to ensure this tool is used by more than just a few AutoCAD users. Today's version extends the last one to include a few more "Settings": Existing settings Output Allows the user to choose whether the captured image is copied to the clipboard or saved to a raster file Background Allows the user to force the background colour to white Hopefully useful for people using a non-quite background but want…
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Thanks to all who provided input on this last post, where I asked for guidance on how best to design the command-line interface for the Screenshot application, the proposed Plugin of the Month for November. The current code is based largely on this previous post, but may end up being extended - in time - to include better 3D support via the technique shown here. Here are some design choices that came out of the comments on the last post: From Fred Dickinson A separate "Settings" option, allowing us to use a sub-menu for our application settings From MJohnston Display…