Best practices for updating our UI to AutoCAD 2015 new dark theme

[mcicognani]

I'm facing the problem to update some plug-ins to 2015 version and of course, I'd like to make the UI as similar as I can to the new dark theme. Right now I think I will hand-pick the colors from the light and dark theme in AutoCAD, fill some structure inside my plugins and attach a reactor to the COLORTHEME variable. Upon startup, or upon variable change, I'd traverse all of the standard components that populate my UI and change the colors as much as I can do to make them look and feel like Autodesk's. Before going too far, will Autodek publish some official guidelines? It wouldn't hurt having official color codes and some how to applyu such colors to standard UI components. Also, will the Guidelines for Icons already published in ADN get updated? Thanks,

[Balaji_Ram]

Hi Massimo,

Thanks for sharing the workaround that you found.

Regards,

Balaji

[mcicognani]

I forgot to say that you need to 'touch' the cuix and mnr files, so that they have exactely the same timestamp. Otherwise AutoCAD may trigger a mnr rebuild and overwrite the correct one you saved before.

[mcicognani]

One more question:

- the resource DLLs can be built targeting both x86 and x64 platforms or do I need to build two distinct set?

If this is the case, in the packagecontents.xml we'd need to specify two different CUIx folder, like:

[...]

<Components Description="2015 x86 plugin">
    <RuntimeRequirements  OS="Win32" Platform="AutoCAD*" SeriesMin="R20.0" SeriesMax="R20.0" />
    <ComponentEntry AppName="comsMyPlugin" Version="1.0.0" ModuleName="./Contents/2015/comsMyPlugin.dll" />

    <ComponentEntry AppName="comsMyPlugin" Version="1.0.0" ModuleName="./Contents/WIN32/comsMyPlugin.cuix" />
</Components>

<Components Description="2015 x64 plugin">
    <RuntimeRequirements  OS="Win64" Platform="AutoCAD*" SeriesMin="R20.0" SeriesMax="R20.0" />
    <ComponentEntry AppName="comsMyPlugin" Version="1.0.0" ModuleName="./Contents/2015/comsMyPlugin.dll" />

    <ComponentEntry AppName="comsMyPlugin" Version="1.0.0" ModuleName="./Contents/WIN64/comsMyPlugin.cuix" />
</Components>

[...]

Correct?

[Balaji_Ram]

Hi Massimo,

Bitness of a resource dll did not seem to matter in the tests that I did.

Both the resource dll build with 32 and 64 bit configurations loaded interchangeably.

But I am not an expert in resource dll so cannot confirm that for sure. There are a few MSDN posts that say bitness does not matter for a resource dll.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsdesktop/en-US/939906c6-03d9-468b-a8dc-5669b6918b41/ca...

If you would want to deploy separate versions of the 32 bit and 64 bit resource dll, then your packagecontent.xml looks ok. 

Regards,

Balaji

[mcicognani]

Thank you Balaji.

What about the behaviour you excaled to engineering? I'm talking about the icon/resource switching according to the current theme.

Any news? Any timeline?

I updated our plugins to work with 2015, but I choose to distribute bitmaps only for light theme. Under dark theme the icons are readable, even if it's not the result you may expect. I placed a note in the 'known problems' section of the help files.

Regards,

Massimo

[Balaji_Ram]

Hi Massimo,

The case notes from the request that I logged with our engineering team suggests that this has been fixed.

Sorry, I am not sure when/how the fix will be made available. 

Regards,

Balaji

[mcicognani]

Hi Balaji,

by chance, do you know if that fis is included in the recent AutoCAD 2015 SP1? The readme doesn't mention it however.

[Balaji_Ram]

Sorry, this fix wasn't included in SP1. 

I just tested it with AutoCAD 2015 SP1 and the behavior was the same.

Regards,

Balaji

[JONTHEPOPE]

I love the new dark theme , saves my eyes all the strain
Thank you Autodesk....