Ribbon freezes with custom WPF objects

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I've been developing a way for our drafters to properly use a layer scheme. I implemented this by using a background database defined in Excel and loading this on startup. The interface is provided by custom ribbon elements as described in Fenton Webb's "UI Design featuring WPF" (autodesk university, 2009).

The ribbon contains the following custom elements:

- two series of radioboxes which are stripped of the default WPF multithreading

- a dropdown which monitors and manipulates LTSCALE

- a dropdown which selects values from the background database. 

- a UserControl which displays information from the background database about the current layer

All this has worked fine on multiple (about eight) computers with AutoCAD 2010 and 2012, vanilla and Map 3D. Now for two users, the workspace randomly freezes up. The freeze is just visually, commands are still executed and it is still possible to switch to a workspace without my ribbon in it, but my ribbon just stays on the foreground. This freeze happens when the user interacts with any part of the ribbon: switching tab, clicking buttons, etcetera.

The only way to resolve this problem so far is as following:

- Switch to another workspace without my custom ribbon tab

- Restart AutoCAD

- Switch back to the original workspace, everything works now

Directly restarting AutoCAD just results in another frozen interface.

Any ideas on how this is caused and of course, how this can be avoided?

With kind regards,

Daniël Vink

Rail design & design automation

[fenton_webb]

Sounds like it might be a .NET runtime version/and or an AutoCAD sp missing issue maybe? I advise installing .NET 4.5 and any AutoCAD updates...

Also, did you see my Performance gauges bundle sample - you should check that out if you have not seen it yet. Makes WPF Ribbon deployment supper easy. http://adndevblog.typepad.com/autocad/2012/06/autocad-performance-gauges-app.html

[Anonymous]

Fenton,

Thanks for your response. The article you provided is certainly helpful and will be keeping me busy for a while :') Unfortunately the company is still on AutoCAD 2010 and .NET 3.5 and the migration to 2012 / .NET 4.0 is slow at best. 

The mentioned bug has not reoccurred after occuring about five times in a few days. As soon as anyone gets the freezes I'll try your fixes.

[CJModis]

Hello.I am trying to understand how to make Custom Control in ribbon.
I found this example - http://adndevblog.typepad.com/autocad/2012/06/autocad-performance-gauges-app.html
It's almost what i want, but I do not use bundle.
How can I add RibbonCompositeItem to Ribbon in code (C#)?

Sorry for poor english - use online translator