Through the Interface

COM vs. .NET in AutoCAD

This was a topic suggested by Scott Underwood (thanks, Scott! :-) to look at COM vs. NET and go through their respective advantages and disadvantages… This is really an interesting discussion topic, and one that I’d like people to help turn into an interesting discussion. I can certainly talk about the differences and pros/cons of the two technologies from my own memory/experience/perspective, but others will have things to say on this, I’m sure... please feel free to do so! :-) Rather than going into low-level detail on either COM or .NET, I’d suggest looking into their respective Wikipedia sites.... Read more →

Techniques for calling AutoCAD commands programmatically

It's quite common to want to call commands from one or other of AutoCAD's programming environments. While it's cleanest (from a purist's perspective) to use an API to perform the task you want, the quickest way - and the one which will appeal to the pragmatists (and the lazy) among us is often to call a sequence of commands. And there are, of course, a few places in AutoCAD where APIs have not been exposed, so scripting commands is the only way to achieve what you want. Let's take the simple example of adding a line. Here's what you'd... Read more →