How do I get started?

[bryanduffel]

Where would be a good place for a rookie programmer / experienced Acad user to begin the learning process for .Net for Autocad? Is this the direction autocad is headed? What about ActiveX? Is that still a major player in the customizing arena?

Thanks for your help.

bryan

[Anonymous]

See
http://arxdummies.blogspot.com/2005/03/autocad-2006-interview-with-albert.html
for one person's take on where AutoCAD is headed with regards to .NET.

It's no secret that Microsoft is strongly pushing .NET and de-emphasizing
unmanaged code and COM. VB6 (perhaps the biggest consumer of ActiveX) is no
longer on main-stream support, and VBA is being replaced with VSTA.

Dan

wrote in message news:5249732@discussion.autodesk.com...
Where would be a good place for a rookie programmer / experienced Acad user
to begin the learning process for .Net for Autocad? Is this the direction
autocad is headed? What about ActiveX? Is that still a major player in the
customizing arena?

Thanks for your help.

bryan

[saluki]

Basically for autocad customization you have:

lisp/autolisp

VBA

.net

ARX

The future of autocad customization will likely provide these plus VSTA (which is like the VBA of .net).

Active X is microsofts may of allowing software and APIs (VBA/VB/.net) communicate. Browse the autocad object model in the autocad help files. This is the model you will use to have your code interact with autocad. If you use a vertical product, such as land desktop it will have an object model as well.

I would recommend learning Visual Basic to start out with. Then you can program in VBA and vb.net, plus it's a good starting language.

Use VBA in autocad, and also download VB.net express edition for free from microsoft. This will allow you to create stand alone applications.

It seems like I learned the most visual basic by creating a stand alone application. Start by making a simple solver, take an equation or formula that you use often and make a form with text boxes and a solve button. If you get stuck post to one of the dot net disccusion groups for help.

http://www.vbdotnetforums.com/

Discussion groups are a great resource for learning programming.

Lisp is good for really simple customizatoin, but as you get more proficient with VBA you'll shy away from LISP.

Depending on what version/platform of autocad you are using you should have some .net sample files located in a directory similar to:

C:\Program Files\Autodesk Product\Sample\Autodesk Product API\vb.net

There are some VBA samples in the sample folder as well.

Good luck.