Visual Basic & VBA
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After one update to the content he originally posted, Stephen Preston has handed the reigns for this DevTV across to Augusto Gonçalves, a São Paulo-based member of our DevTech Americas team. Augusto presented his work to rave reviews at AU 2009, and has now updated the online DevTV content. I've gone ahead and updated the original post to point to this new content, but here are the links, for your convenience: AutoCAD VBA to VB.NET Migration Basics view download (44.7 Mb) Aside from upgrading the presenter (sorry, Stephen – I couldn't resist 😉 we've made some additional enhancements in this…
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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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As mentioned in this previous post, at this year's Autodesk University the "Developer Track" has rightly been combined with the "Customization & Programming" track (it made sense to rationalise these two tracks which had a very similar style of class). So unlike in previous years, the sessions we're either presenting or helping coordinate are listed with the "CP" prefix. Here's a quick round-up of the AutoCAD-related physical classes, labs and panel sessions being presented either by my team or by members of Engineering (with my team helping coordinate): CP104-1 Using .NET 4.0 with AutoCAD Albert Szilvasy CP308-4 AutoCAD VBA to .NET…
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Sorry for the late notice on this one… I'd have posted sooner but for having taken some time off, last week, to take the family to Disneyland Paris. Now I just need a few more days of vacation to recover. :-S 🙂 Tomorrow there's a free webcast showing how to migrate your VBA code to use VBA.NET. The content focuses primarily on the use of COM Interop to quickly get your VBA code working from VB.NET, building on the DevTV session mentioned previously and using its accompanying migration tool. The session will be taking place at 8am Pacific/10am Eastern/4pm in…
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This post is to bring you up-to-date on DevLabs, an initiative I've mentioned a couple of times in recent months. We've so far held two very successful DevLab events in Farnborough and San Francisco. The feedback we've received from attendees has been overwhelming positive, and the people from my team who hosted the events found the experience extremely rewarding. So yes, full speed ahead with the remaining, scheduled DevLabs events in China and India: Beijing, China August 17-21, AutoCAD and Autodesk Inventor APIs August 24-28, Geospatial and Revit APIs Bangalore, India September 8–11, Geospatial and Revit APIs September 14-17, AutoCAD…
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While I'm a huge fan of learning and using different programming languages – whether to train your brain to consider different potential solutions to a problem or to improve your job security and your ability to roll with the punches as the employment & technology landscapes shift – you will no doubt have noticed that the vast majority of my posts contain C# code. A lot of my early programming (both work and fun) was in BASIC (whether BBC BASIC, Level II BASIC on the TRS-80 or GW-BASIC) and some of the more involved internal projects I've worked on at…
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Stephen Preston has updated his "AutoCAD VBA to .NET Migration Basics" DevTV session. I've updated the links in this previous post to point to the updated DevTV, as the original recording is likely to disappear during the coming days. Here's an update from Stephen on what's new in this version: New features of the migration tool: Automatically adds 'ObjectDBX' Type Library to created VB6 project file to ensure Autodesk.AutoCAD.Interop.Common classes are correctly identified (previously these came in as Autodesk.AutoCAD.Interop) Extra functionality to post-process your VB Express project for you: - Adds F5 startup application - Adds references to acmgd and…
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As mentioned in a comment on a recent post, Stephen Preston, our DevTech Americas Manager, has put together a useful tool and accompanying DevTV session to help people migrate their VBA code to VB.NET. The resultant code uses COM Interop to call into AutoCAD. AutoCAD VBA to .NET Migration Basics view download (44.3 Mb) Stephen considers this presentation, and the migration tool itself, to be in draft form. If you have feedback, please do send Stephen an email.
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A recent comment on one of my F# articles got me thinking about this topic (thanks, Thomas! :-), so I thought I'd write a few posts on it. Next week is AU, and the week after that I'm attending a training class in Boston, so posts may be a little sparse over the coming weeks. Metaprogramming – according to the definition on Wikipedia – is the act of writing code that writes or manipulates other programs (or itself). But what is it really all about? The vast majority of programmers are actually metaprogramming without realizing it has such a fancy…
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This is an interesting topic – and one that I'm far from being expert in – so it would be great if readers could submit comments with additional information. Intellectual property protection is a major concern for software developers, and issues that are seen today with .NET languages have been troubling AutoCAD developers since the introduction of AutoLISP. So, what are these issues? As a professional software developer, if you ship source-code to your customers there is substantial risk of it being borrowed or stolen for use in other unlicensed situations. This is true if you ship the actual source…