Addin Devlopment

[johnteng00]

Hi guys,

I want to develop a plugin for Fusion 360 based on c++. Now I have the following questions:

a. what version of visual studio I should use? Visual Studio 2022 community version?

b. Are there sample projects that I can look at? Like objectarx, there are many sample projects which helps me a lot.

c. What version of Fusion I should use? I have seen there are many Fusion version, like Fusion 360, Fusion 360 extensions.

Thank you.

Regards

John

[kandennti]

Hi @johnteng00 -San.

I only understand python, so I can't give detailed advice, but you may want to refer to this one.

https://help.autodesk.com/view/fusion360/ENU/?guid=GUID-ECC0A398-4D89-4776-A054-F7B432F7FCF6 

I know there are fewer C++ samples, but I think this one will be useful as well.

https://help.autodesk.com/view/fusion360/ENU/?guid=SampleList 

If you have any questions, you can ask them in this forum.

[j4n.vokurka]

Hi @johnteng00 ,

I've been developing in Fusion in C++ for quite a while now and while using Visual Studio 2022 I haven't faced any major issues so far. The documentation that @kandennti provided links to is definitely worth going through. Watch out that some of the C++ samples aren't functioning properly although their Python equivalent is working fine. This happened to me a few times and you will have to debug those cases. Otherwise Stack Overflow should be enough to help you solve most issues.

Just one problem I can think of was when I tried to distribute the add-in for testing to my colleagues for the first time and around half of them couldn't run the add-in even though they have implemented it correctly. Turned out project's properties including C++ standard were set wrongly. I had to manually set them and then everything worked fine from there on but I had to rewrite some expressions in the code so it would be wise to set those properties correctly when you first open the add-in.

Good luck