My apologies to those expecting more on IP protection in .NET - I ended up deciding to make this interim post regarding a longstanding issue. I'll get right back to the IP question next (I hope :-).
Back in a much earlier post we looked at getting the ObjectARX & Managed Wizards working with the Express editions of Visual Studio. While it was successful enough with C++ Express, VB and C# Express proved to be trickier animals - as was clear from the long thread that followed the post.
Anyway, Cyrille Fauvel, the principle author of various Visual Studio Wizards and all-round guru, took a look at this (which included installing C# Express on a fresh OS install), and confirmed the suspicion that VB and C# Express do not appear to support dialog-based Wizards. It may be possible to get them working by also installing C++ Express or possibly full Visual Studio (for them to really work properly), but that somewhat defeats the object of the exercise.
Well, the good news is that we really don't need a dialog-based Wizard for VB or C# projects - a project template is adequate (thanks to Tim Sprout for suggesting this approach).
Cyrille has worked his magic and created a couple of templates for AutoCAD 2007 VB & C#:
AutoCAD_2007_vb.zip
AutoCAD_2007_cs.zip
Just copy these files into your "My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual Basic" and "C:\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#" folders respectively, and you should now see the templates as options when you create a new project. The projects created should also work for AutoCAD 2005 & 2006 - it's just that you'll need to changed the assembly references to point to the correct versions of acmgd.dll and acdbmgd.dll.
Please give them a try and let me know any feedback...
