How to make plugin for Autocad.

[Anonymous]

Hey people, 

As I am new to autocad but i m having a good programing knowledge and i want to develop a plugin for supporting my team in some task. I have been through that first plugin course but it didnt helped me that much deeper. I want to know from where i should start and from where i will get the knowledge about developing the plugin.

[norman.yuan]

Since you mentioned "first plugin course", I assume you are talking about doing AutoCAD plugin with its .NET API (thus, using either C# or VB.NET).

Indeed, the "first plugin" is really not a good "first course" to learn AutoCAD .NET API programming: the topic used for it "Overrule" is rather advanced AutoCAD .NET API topic. With that course, you should focus on the process of how a plugin is ccreated and works in AutoCAD with .NET API., not the advanced AutoCAD entity/database/document manipulating stuff. 

Assume you find out the "First Plugin" course here:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=1911627

Instead of clicking link to dive into the "first plugin", you should look a bit further down, in the "Learning" section and click links on "AutoCAD 201x .NET Training", from which you download .NET Labs source code that really get you started to learn AutoCAD .NET API from the very basic (printing "Hello World" at command line). After you have done all the labs, then you are at the point to do your "first plugin". By the way, to go through the basic .NET labs, being knowledgeable on programming is not enough, you must have the necessary AutoCAD knowledge (I'd say, above average AutoCAD user is necessary in order to development plugin for AutoCAD users).

Also, this forum, in spite of its name "Visual Basic" for historic reason, is most meant for AutoCAD VBA (COM API). For AutoCAD .NET topic, it woul be better to post in .NET forum.

HTH