AutoCAD DevBlog

Webcast archive

By Stephen Preston

A quick post to advertise the existence of our ADN webcast archive for those of you who haven’t found it yet. The recordings posted here are of live webcasts, so they are a little raw in places. And some of them are getting a little old now, but there’s still plenty of useful information there.

Talking of recordings, another great resource is the AU Online archive. Here’s a link to the list classes from the Customization and Programming track. Many of these include recordings of the live AU presentations. The rest should at least have downloads of the class handouts. You’ll need an AU Online login to download the material.

Enjoy!

And have a great weekend .

DevTV: AutoCAD .NET Labs

By Wayne Brill

This DevTV is a screen cast walkthrough of the .NET training material for AutoCAD 2012. (It also includes demos of creating the labs).

Most of the training will apply to AutoCAD 2013 as well. The main difference is that for 2013 you also need to reference accore.dll.

DevTV - AutoCAD.Net Training.zip

 AutoCAD .NET Labs

AutoCAD 2013 .Net Training Labs

AutoCAD 2010-2012 .Net Training Labs

DevTV: Non-COM Property System

By Adam Nagy

We've created a DevTV on the Non-COM Property System (codenamed Ubiquity), which got a public API in the latest release of AutoCAD. In the past you needed to create COM classes to add properties to your custom entities that could be seen in the Properties palette.
Now you can do it without using COM – hence the name 'Non-COM Property System'.

DevTV - Ubiquity

Dynamic.Net API for AutoCAD 2013

By Philippe Leefsma

 

AutoCAD 2013, codename Jaws, is coming with a brand new feature in the API that will benefit .Net developers: the Dynamic.Net API.

You may be already familiar or read about the new “dynamic” functionality introduced by .Net Framework 4.0. Well, in case you haven’t no worries, this DevTV will take you through the basics and main advantages of dynamic.Net.

The AutoCAD 2013 .Net API is leveraging the dynamic functionality provided by .Net 4.0 by implementing custom logic on top of the DLR or Dynamic Language Runtime, the core supporter of dynamic .Net.

Why is it relevant for you as an AutoCAD.Net developer? We can mention straight away a new simplified syntax when writing AutoCAD.Net programs, for example no need to create transactions to access our database objects when using the dynamic.Net API. Your code will look significantly more compact and easier to read, especially for somebody who start learning the API.

Another significant functionality is the ability to perform LINQ based queries on the AutoCAD Database and its entities…

For a complete overview on the topic, including C# and VB.Net code samples, download the AutoCAD Dynamic.Net API DevTV here !

Migrating ObjectARX and .NET plug-ins to AutoCAD 2013

By Stephen Preston

Here are two videos documenting the simple steps required to migrate your AutoCAD ObjectARX and .NET plug-ins to AutoCAD 2013. The videos were recorded for the benefit of our Autodesk Developer Network partners during the Beta cycle, which means you’ll see/hear references to AutoCAD ‘Jaws’. Jaws was the codename for AutoCAD 2013 during development, so just substitute ‘2013’ every time you see/hear the word ‘Jaws’.

Download the videos from the following links, extract the files from the zip, and click in the HTML or MP4 file to play the video.

ObjectARX Migration – recorded by Fenton Webb. (Includes an AutoCAD 2013 version of the Visual Teefy project migration wizard).

.NET Migration – recorded by Stephen Preston

Update (May 29th 2012): See this post for a clarification of the use of extension methods in AutoCAD 2013.

Getting started with AccoreConsole

By Balaji Ramamoorthy

AutoCAD 2013 has a command line version of AutoCAD that can help you with significantly faster batch processing of drawings. Please note that the use of this utility is not officially supported by Autodesk. Here is a quick introduction to get you started with it.

In the AutoCAD 2013 install folder, you can find the "AccoreConsole.exe". Just running it will display the command line switches that can be used with it.

It accepts four command line switches :

1) /i : Used to specify the drawing file path on which to run the script file

2) /s : Used to specify the path to the script file.

3) /l : If language packs are installed, you have the choice to invoke the language version of accoreconsole. The commands in the script file can then be in one of the languages that you have installed in your system.

4) /isolate : Used to prevent the changes to the system variables from affecting regular AutoCAD.

As an example, it is most common to set the "FILEDIA" system variable to 0 in your script files.

But if you do not want this system variable change to take effect when you start regular AutoCAD the next time, then you can use the "isolate" switch. This ensures that changes are kept local to accoreconsole.

Finally, if you need more details regarding AccoreConsole, have a look at the DevTV.

AccoreConsole DevTV

Happy batch processing !