I wasn't planning on posting to this blog again, this week – three times per week is enough, I find, so I tend to save any leftovers for the week after – but this question James Maeding asked is very much related to this week's posts, and – in any case – I already have three fun posts planned for next week. 🙂 Here's the question James asked, again: wish I had something to make tooltips disappear when needed. I like them on for many things, but then they get in the way sometimes, and you have to cancel all…

In the first post in this series, we saw how to disable AutoCAD's ribbon. In the second post, we saw how to make (with some caveats) AutoCAD's toolbars disappear. In this post we're going to throw all that away and show how to get better results with a single line of code. <sigh> But before all that, a big "thanks" to both James Meading and Alexander Rivilis, who have helped us get to this point. James pointed out a fairly significant flaw in yesterday's toolbar-hiding code (hence the mention of caveats, above), in that it didn't place toolbars on multiple…

It turns out that the forum request I attempted to cover in the last post – handily re-interpreted to deal with something I knew how to do 😉 – was in fact about toolbars, rather than the ribbon. In this post we're going to look at how to disable toolbars – and re-enable them – using .NET, so that Pete's original request is dealt with. To start with, there's no real way to grey out toolbars via the API – at least not at the toolbar level, perhaps it can be done per toolbar item – so I've opted just…

I came across this interesting question on the AutoCAD .NET forum, posted by Pete Elliott: When AutoCAD is loading, I see that my toolbars are disabled (grayed-out) until the loading has finished.  Our company does some additional data loading after AutoCAD has become idle.  But if the user clicks certain custom toolbar buttons while our additional data is loading, AutoCAD fatal errors.  Is there a way we can disable the toolbars (like AutoCAD does) until our loading is finished, and then enable them?  I haven't been able to locate an API that provides this capability.  Any suggestions greatly appreciated! It…

This came up during an internal discussion and I thought it worth sharing here. It's easy enough to use a point monitor in AutoCAD to determine the current cursor location, but how do we make sure it's in the current User Coordinate System (UCS) and that we adjust for object snapping (osnap)? To keep the code simple I've been a little lazy: I'm just adding an event handler as a lambda, without worrying about removing it. Also, to avoid a crash when you switch to the New Tab page or a new document and back, the code swallows an eNotApplicable…