Visual Studio
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It's been a long time since I've dabbled with software deployment technology, which is absolutely fine by me (in my experience installation issues are some of the gnarliest to deal with, so – presumably like the majority of developers, with apologies to Install specialists – I prefer not having to care about them, myself). But last week I had to put together a few installers - as an internal test - for some of our Plugins of the Month, and ended up deciding the process was worth documenting, especially where it relates to the RegDL component I created and published…
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Thanks to Kristine Middlemiss, from our DevTech Media & Entertainment team, for bringing this very cool application to my attention. There a few Visual Studio Add-Ins that I can no longer do without. I use CopySourceAsHtml for every blog post of mine that includes source code, and I'm now just beginning to form a similar dependency on RockScroll. This Add-In integrates with Visual Studio (in my case 2008, as I'm typically slow to install the latest & greatest VS release) to display a thumbnail view of your current source file in a fattened, still perfectly functional scrollbar: This tool is…
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This question has popped up a few times since Visual Studio 2010's recent launch. I received it by email overnight from Roland Cox, which is interesting as I'd already planned this post for today. Do you know how to debug AutoCAD and a custom add in using Visual Studio 2010? What settings do I need to make? I know the add is getting loaded (the code runs in AutoCAD) but I can't set a breakpoint (it shows a empty circle saying that VS doesn't have the assembly loaded). I first saw this issue raised a few times on threads with…
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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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In the first post in this series we looked at the basic (and free) capabilities of the upcoming version 6 of .NET Reflector. Today we'll look at the "Pro" capabilities, which integrate decompilation with debugging of 3rd party assemblies. To get started, we should see a new ".NET Reflector" toolbar inside our Visual Studio installation. On it, we should see a "Choose Assemblies to Debug…" option: This option launches an analysis of our currently open solution, to understand the assemblies that have been referenced inside it: One very important thing to note: for Reflector to work, you must have assembly…
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As many of you will know, by now, I'm a big fan of Reflector. I've used it for quite some time, since its early days as a piece of freeware developed by Lutz Roeder, and overall it's proven to be an extremely valuable tool. When a UK-based company, Red Gate Software, acquired the Reflector technology back in 2008, I was curious as to their strategy for monetizing it (and it seems I wasn't alone in speculating on the direction the tool would take as a commercial offering). Well, that's now starting to become clear with the Beta release of .NET…
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As mentioned a few months ago, we've been working on a project wizard for AutoCAD .NET development. The official version of this tool is now available via the AutoCAD Developer Center (a direct link to the download can be found here). We incorporated a number of enhancement requests received from people working with the previous, draft version, but I don't have an exhaustive list of the updates, unfortunately. If you provided feedback, thank you for taking the time to do so, and hopefully the issue you faced has been addressed in this updated version (and please do let us know,…
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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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While not necessarily relevant when working with AutoCAD data, it's very common for people to want to make use of adjacent database systems when developing AutoCAD applications. For just this reason I've been meaning to post something on LINQ (and, in due course, PLINQ), but for now I recommend checking out this guest post from Joel Karr over on Jeremy Tammik's The Building Coder. Thanks for the tip, Jeremy! 🙂
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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:…