I know this is an old post, but I feel a rant is in order here. I must agree with OP on his disdain for VS and his desire for a neat and simple programming interface as AutoCAD used to provide as part of the core Autocad environment. Not all who use Autocad are programmers. In fact, the vast majority of AutoCAD users believe they have no need for .net, vba, or probably even LISP. But there are those of us who understand that automation is important to producing deliverables faster, which means happier clients and happier businesses. For us, although we might enjoy diving into some code now and then for fun, it is a matter of necessity that we automate certain aspects of our work. Unless I am way out in left field, this is where the OP is coming from on this one, and he is ABSOLUTELY CORRECT that VS (and you can pick your version) sucks. Not only is it yet another Microsoft product that usurps our computers and fills it with bloated crap, most of the time, we do not need nor do we have any use for the power that comes along with VS or even .net for that matter. We just want something simple that will allow us to manipulate drawings, automatically create and manipulate entities, and integrate MS Word/Excel documents into our schedules and tables. We don't want to power develop for Android and we sure don't need to learn an entirely new language so we can produce apps. Apps Schmapps. Most of us have already taken LISP as far as it can go, and we still use a few routines we wrote back in 1992 (speaking for myself, I suppose). The point is, we want simple, easy, and effective not powerful, fancy, and code trendy. We rarely need to do much more than loop through entities and perform some functions or bring up a file dialog box and pick a directory, but AutoDesk has made even the simplest automation task a massive headache for anyone who does not code for a living. So, the snobs who look down on VBA, or believe that AutoLISP is antiquated and should be put out to pasture, are missing the reason why VBA was a great environment for many of us. It plays very nicely with Excel and Word, it was fairly easy for non-programmers to learn, it could do just about everything we needed it to do, and it did not cost us another dime because it came with AutoCAD, Word, Excel, Access, and a lot of other applications. For us to have to re-code all of our solutions and learn yet another programming language when we never really wanted to learn one is not only inconsiderate of AutoDesk, it is enough to push me over to another CAD platform that understands the needs of its users. We don't need a new version every year, and in fact, we would prefer you just give us a bug-free version once every few years. As soon as I find a reasonable alternative that isn't an AutoDesk product for civil design, AutoCAD will be gone from my life forever. Autodesk should take notice of the silent masses whom they are alienating with their user-unfriendly policies and platform changes. There are a lot more of us than there are people who code .net for Autocad for a living. Maybe that is how they want it... Rant over.
