Instant Autodesk AutoCAD 2014 Customization with .NET

Use AutoCAD's .NET API to create your own powerful, custom applications for AutoCAD

Overview

• Learn something new in an Instant! A short, fast, focused guide delivering immediate results
• Create powerful AutoCAD plugins to automate and accelerate your design and drawing processes
• Design your own custom AutoCAD command, adding a simple yet powerful interface to drive your command
• Customize AutoCAD’s user interface and add your own controls to the built-in Ribbon

In Detail

AutoCAD's .NET API can be used to create small but powerful applications that help CAD users achieve productivity gains and improve quality. CAD users can accelerate drafting and design processes, improve drawing accuracy, minimize time spent on repetitive or demanding tasks, and reduce errors. In short, users can deliver better drawings faster with customized CAD tools.

Learn how to use AutoCAD's .NET API to create your own high-powered, custom applications for AutoCAD. This book is a toolbox of small projects for handling common AutoCAD tasks. You can add to these recipes to develop your own specialized AutoCAD program library. Clear, step-by-step instructions and complete code examples illustrate the process, making it easy to develop your own custom AutoCAD tools.

Giving you the building blocks of AutoCAD application development, you’ll learn to create compact user interfaces for your AutoCAD plugins and add command buttons to the ribbon interface. Next, you’ll create programs to insert and modify AutoCAD block and attribute references, as well as working with custom data stored on AutoCAD objects. Learn how to publish layouts from external drawings in multi-sheet PDF files, export AutoCAD data to MS Excel for processing, and respond to AutoCAD event notifications (such as when an object is selected). With the tools presented in this book, you can develop and implement new functionality to address your specialized business needs.

What you will learn from this book

• Set up your development environment to build your own custom AutoCAD applications
• Automate your layout configuration, block insertion, reading and writing attribute values, and setting block reference properties
• Read, write, and manipulate extended entity data stored in AutoCAD objects
• Capture, organize and display AutoCAD object data
• Select layouts from an external drawing file and use AutoCAD’s Publisher API to publish the layouts in a multi-sheet PDF file
• Export your CAD data to a spreadsheet application to organize and sort the data
• Add custom buttons to the AutoCAD ribbon interface to execute frequently used commands
• Communicate with Autolisp programs. Define a .NET LispFunction to interact with an Autolisp function
• React in real-time to changes in your AutoCAD drawing using AutoCAD event handlers

Approach

Filled with practical, step-by-step instructions and clear explanations for the most important and useful tasks. An instruction-based guide with examples written in the C# programming language. VB.NET programmers can also take advantage of these examples by using one of the free conversion websites to convert the examples to VB.NET.

Clear, step-by-step instructions and complete code examples illustrate the processes, making it easy to develop your own custom AutoCAD tools.