I have done several, what I would call, "major" programs in lisp. We are talking more than 10,000 lines of code each. I
use ObjectDCL for the dialogs, so I can write stuff that looks as good as VBA or C. Problem is, the ObjectDCL program
is third party and I am seriously worried about depending on it. So I need to see what I can use instead for progs that
have modeless dialogs, and a lot of command line interaction with users.
I have also done several large programs with VB6, so I am very familiar with how to hook up to acad through com and do
things. I have never liked the results though. Speed is one issue, but getting user input from the command line is a
bigger issue.
I am not interested in pursuing VB6 or VBA at this point, only .net or C++.
Here are my questions:
In VB6, for modeless dialogs, I would hold a reference to the acad application as one of the form's properties. Then,
anything in the diloag needing acad would be hooked to acad.
Does .net (using the .net acad API, not com) use a similar method to stay hooked with a drawing?
Or does .net run "in process" like lisp and VBA? That would be ideal I think.
With .net, how do you deal with command line access? If a modeless dialog tries to run when another command is active,
can you reliably catch the error?
I guess I am looking for someone who has actually written something using modeless dialogs and has dealt with these
issues in a real program. I need to be able to handle sloppy user interaction without crashing acad.
Thanks for any advice and feel free to redirect me to threads I missed on this.
James Maeding
Civil Engineer and Programmer
jmaeding - athunsaker - com