A couple of newbie Q's: Error message & loading Acad help.

[Anonymous]

Hi
It's my first day at transferring from vba to vb.net & struggling a bit (not helped by the fact all Autocad's own examples have errors in them). Hope you can help with these two:

1. I've loaded & built one of the example included in the object.arx download. I load & run the .dll once & it works as expected. If I edit & rebuild I get this error:  

Unable to copy file "obj\Release\HelloWorld.dll" to "bin\HelloWorld.dll". The process cannot access the file 'bin\HelloWorld.dll' because it is being used by another process.

I get it on all the routines I tried. I've done a search online - nothing specific to AutoCAD but the general vb community doesn't appear to have much of a solution.

2. I'm using the Microsoft VB Express IDE. How do I load the offline help files for AutoCAD so when I highlight a word & press F1 it displays a help page for it? I've managed to do it for the general vb.net commands which use .msha files. Is there an equivalent for Acad?

Cheers
Dave F.

[Alfred.NESWADBA]

HI,

>> The process cannot access the file 'bin\HelloWorld.dll' because it is being used by another process.

I assume you have another instance of ACAD.EXE running that has loaded this DLL. Maybe it's an invisible windows, look therefor in Windows-TaskManager if you find a process called ACAD.EXE in the list of processes.

>> How do I load the offline help files for AutoCAD so when I highlight a word & press F1 it displays a help page for it?

Within the ObjectARX-kit there was an MSI that installs that help-support. But I don't use it and I don't know if it's working with the Express-version.

Good luck, - alfred -

[Anonymous]

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@Alfred.NESWADBA wrote:

HI,

>>I assume you have another instance of ACAD.EXE running that has loaded this DLL. Maybe it's an invisible windows, look therefor in Windows-TaskManager if you find a process called ACAD.EXE in the list of processes.

I checked & rebooted. Only one instance running. As I said, it runs fine first time & when I rebuild throws the error.

>> How do I load the offline help files for AutoCAD so when I highlight a word & press F1 it displays a help page for it?

Within the ObjectARX-kit there was an MSI that installs that help-support. But I don't use it and I don't know if it's working with the Express-version.

I'd already installed that file. They appear to be .HxS files & no idea how to integrate them, if in fact, there the correct ones.

Good luck, - alfred -

Thanks, I think I'm goingto need it.:)

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[Alfred.NESWADBA]

Hi,

if you start VS in debug-mode, then you load your DLL into this AutoCAD instance using command _NETLOAD ... and you quit then AutoCAD ==> does VisualStudio come back to you, do you see that debuging-mode ended?

Other option: don't do a restart of your system. Look into the TaskManager if AutoCAD is running. Sometimes there are references build (or COM-activities) that may block AutoCAD from beeing quited in a clean way. It get's invisible, but it stays as a running process in the background. That is what I imagine as the source of your problem (otherwise you would be able to rebuild your solution).

- alfred -