Through the Interface

Cloud & Mobile DevBlog

To complement the DevBlogs for AutoCAD, Infrastructure Modeling, AEC and Manufacturing (and in case you missed them, here are their respective announcements), the ADN team has now launched a DevBlog focused on Cloud & Mobile development.

You might consider this another “horizontal” blog, in the sense that over time it will prove to be a valuable resource for people using our products (and, I suspect, many people who don’t) in all the industries we serve.

I’ll drop a note to Gopi, to suggest he adds a link to my own cloud & mobile series, for future reference.

It seems like a good time to provide a bit of background on these DevBlogs and the motivation behind them…

It’s clear our ADN team is focusing more of its resources on providing public information and assistance. The trend started several years ago, during the time I was part of that team: between our developer blogs, our Plugins of the Month, the My First Plugin material and a gradual increase in our presence on the API discussion groups.

All this has been part of a broader strategy to do more for customers who don’t necessarily see the benefit of paying an annual fee to be part of the ADN program.

One further piece of this strategy is going to be unveiled during the coming weeks (we’re just working on some back-end infrastructure before the public launch). Without giving too much away, I will say that I expect many of this blog’s readers to find it pretty interesting. Watch this space! :-)

Update:

For those of you interested in an aggregated feed of the various developer-oriented Autodesk blogs, I went ahead and updated the Yahoo! Pipe I originally created some time ago to include the various ADN DevBlogs. As I know AlexF will be pinging me for it, anyway, as soon as he sees this post. ;-)

Around the Corner: a new M&E developer blog

A long-time friend, colleague and worldwide M&E Manager for ADN, Cyrille Fauvel, has started Around the Corner, a blog focused on developing with Autodesk Maya, MotionBuilder, Mudbox and FBX. A member of Cyrille’s team, Kristine Middlemiss, who co-authors the popular Maya Station blog, will also be co-authoring this new blog.

For anyone interested in developing with Autodesk’s Media and Entertainment products, this is going to be an extremely valuable resource: these two really know their stuff.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Cyrille, and well done for contributing to a second blog, Kristine! :-)

Manufacturing DevBlog

Some time ago I mentioned the launch of ADN's DevBlogs, and followed up, last week, with the announcement that the AEC version had launched.

Now that we have DevBlogs covering AutoCAD, Infrastructure Modeling and our AEC products, it’s only natural that we launch a Manufacturing DevBlog.

Brian has mentioned it, over on his blog, too. Those of you working with Inventor, in particular, should be sure to bookmark Brian & Wayne’s Mod the Machine blog as well as the Manufacturing DevBlog (after a period of relatively low activity, things have definitely picked up over at MtM).

It’s great to see these blogs launched, and I know they’ll be a great resource for developers. I’m already finding that the availability of AutoCAD-related developer content on another Autodesk blog is freeing me up to tackle quite different topics (which are more aligned with my new role but also a little more forward-looking).

If you do have topics related to our products that you’d like to see addressed, be sure to keep letting me know. I can very easily pass them on to the ADN team, should it make more sense for someone in that team to tackle them.

AEC DevBlog & a month to go until DevCamps

As announced previously on this blog, the Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) team is in the process of launching a series of DevBlogs, publishing material publicly that would previously only have been made available to ADN members. I see some fantastic material being posted there: more than I can keep up with, personally, but I expect that will settle down once the team has created posts from the bulk of the DevNotes published on the ADN web-site.

Following the availability of those for AutoCAD and Infrastructure Modeling, I’m pleased to announce the AEC DevBlog is now live.

If you’re [considering] developing for Revit, Navisworks or our other AEC and BIM technologies, be sure to bookmark this page and visit often.

On a somewhat related note, I also wanted to remind you that there’s now only a month to go until this year’s AEC and Manufacturing DevCamps. If you’ve held off from registering, be sure to do so soon: time is running out!

Announcing DevBlogs from ADN

I’m very happy to announce the creation of a series of new blogs by the Autodesk Developer Network team, marking a significant shift from the team creating material that’s only available to ADN members (i.e. DevNotes behind the ADN extranet) to creating material that’s available to everyone.

The first two are available now:

AutoCAD DevBlog

Infrastructure Modeling DevBlog

(You’ll find the ADN team has been generating material for some time, building up a decent head of steam before launching publicly.)

To explain a bit of the background to these posts, check out Stephen Preston’s welcome post.

Expect more of these blogs, coming soon, whether for AEC, Manufacturing or Media & Entertainment.

A new Autodesk blog on partnering: Dances with Elephants

I’m delighted to be announcing that Jim Quanci, Director of the Autodesk Developer Network, has started a blog on partnering with large companies such as Autodesk: Dances with Elephants. I know Jim has been considering writing a blog for some time, and I’m really happy he’s managed to find the time in his busy schedule to get this one going.

I’ve worked with Jim pretty much since I started at Autodesk, and have reported directly to him for the last 6.5 years (although that will change in a few short weeks). I’m definitely going to miss being part of his team – and having him as a boss – but I fully expect to be in regular contact with him in my new role, and may even see him more often, depending on the frequency of my trips to the Bay Area.

Be sure to bookmark Jim’s blog and check it from time to time – I have no doubt it’ll be a great read, whether you’re currently partnering with Autodesk, considering doing so, or just have an interest in understanding the dynamics between independent software developers and their platform providers.

photo credit: jidanchaomian via photopin cc

A guide-line for Visual Studio

And yes, I do mean that literally. :-)

Since starting this blog, 5 years ago – and even more in the last 2 years, since starting to develop and edit our Plugins of the Month for Autodesk Labs – I’ve been checking every line of code I’ve written to make sure it doesn’t exceed 70 characters in length (the magic number for fitting my blog’s width). It’s become close to automatic – in the sense I rarely write lines that exceed this length and therefore need adjusting – but the process I use is still quite manual: I check the status bar in Visual Studio to get the column count of the cursor position.

Augusto Gonçalves, from our DevTech team in Brazil, pointed out a nifty technique to add a guide-line (hence the post’s title) to Visual Studio at a certain column width. Here’s the Registry information (which can be saved to a .reg and merged with your Registry) that will do this for Visual Studio 2008:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

 

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Text Editor]

"Guides"="RGB(128,0,0) 70"

Just changing the Registry information to 10.0 instead of 9.0 didn’t just make it work for Visual Studio 2010 on my system, despite information to the contrary on StackOverflow. But Daniel Du, from DevTech China, did point me to a handy Visual Studio extension (which comes in two parts and is described in this  blog post).

After installing the two extensions, it was possible for me to add a guideline at a particular column width by placing the cursor at the desired width, right-clicking and selecting “Add guideline”:

Which leads to our guideline being displayed (with the selected colour):

Interestingly, looking at the Registry the extension is actually modifying the entry that didn’t seem to have an effect when entered via the .reg file, so I assume there’s an additional entry I was missing. But anyway – the end result is what’s important, and this will save me a lot of effort. And hopefully some of you, too. :-)

A couple of blog enhancements

I’ve made added a few new features to this blog over the last few weeks, to help people find related content and to get content in their preferred language.

At the bottom of each post – both on the individual posts and the index pages – you’ll find a set of thumbnails delivered by LinkWithin which link – hopefully, at least – to related posts on this blog. Going by the number of people using them to access additional content on the blog, it seems to be of benefit to some readers, at least.

I’ve also just integrated a translation widget from Microsoft in the left-sash (as it’s too wide to fit on the right). If you need to copy & paste code, I still very much recommend using the original page: I haven’t yet added custom tags to tell the translator to ignore code blocks (and I’m not sure I can easily do so, retroactively, in any case).

Hopefully both tools will be of use to people: if you have feedback, either way (such as “the LinkWithin choices aren’t very relevant”, “the quality of the translation into Turkish is poor”, etc.) please do post a comment.

A new blog on AutoCAD Civil 3D development

Many readers of this blog are developing code to work with AutoCAD Civil 3D, so I have no doubt that the information in today’s post will be welcomed.

Isaac Rodriguez, the Software Engineering Lead for the AutoCAD Civil 3D API, has started Civilized Development, a new blog about developing for AutoCAD Civil 3D. In his welcome post, Isaac describes his motivations for creating the blog and sets expectations for his readers.

In case you have suggestions of topics for Isaac to cover, you can post a comment on his blog, email him or contact him via Twitter.

A very warm welcome to the blogosphere, Isaac! :-)

It’s All Just Ones and Zeros: new Autodesk Vault developer blog

I’d like to extend a warm welcome to the Autodesk developer blogosphere to Doug Redmond, who has recently started a blog focused on programming and administering Autodesk Vault, It’s All Just Ones and Zeros.

Doug is a long-time contributor to Autodesk’s development community, whether helping my team deal with complex API issues or presenting the Vault API at ADN events and at AU, he has a boundless passion for helping people customizing and developing with Autodesk Vault.

If you’re interested in working deeply with Vault technology – or are already doing so – then I’m sure that Doug’s blog will prove an invaluable resource for you.