By Malcom Fernandes
While working in the trenches with AutoCAD or Civil 3D, have you ever muttered “there has to be an easier way.”? Because AutoCAD and Civil 3D have a huge impact in how we design, draft and build real world projects, there are times that the tools availale may not always match our workflow. It is times like these when we wish there were an easier way.
My first productive tool was in the mid 80’s. We had recently purchased AutoCAD 2.1 and although the sales demo showed how we could draw an organizational hierarchy chart, we still purchased AutoCAD to help us draft legal plans (plats). The struggle was in annotating the plan. It involved listing the line or arc and then typing the length, bearing, delta and radius as text. The only LISP book I could find at that time was from the university library on Common LISP. But it had enough that I could create an application to annotate an entire drawing. The program still works AutoCAD 2015.
The need for “an easier way” created a whole new industry of third party tools for Autodesk products. In my opinion this in itself, gave rise to AutoCAD. You had industry expects developing tools that expanded AutoCAD from a simple digital drafting board to an industry specific design and drafting production tool. Realizing this, Autodesk introduced an alternative to LISP, Watcom C. I had to bypass this era as my firm at the time could not justify purchasing a C compiler. Soon after, Autodesk introduced Visual Basic for Application (VBA) and VB. Great advantage, especially over the LISP Dialog Control Language (DCL). Today the latest and greatest for rapid development seems to be Visual Studio, Basic or C#.
Over the years Autodesk has consumed and included some of the third party products either as core tools in standard AutoCAD or as vertical products. However, there still may be a need to have custom functionality to address specific requirements within your organization or project.
To this end, we at IMAGINiT have a core development group spanning a vast number of industries, that may be able to help your organization. However, if you are like me and get a high from building your very own app and running down the hall yelling “Eureka I got it!”, then here a white paper that may help you get your feet wet in writing your first AutoCAD or Civil 3D application.
Hopefully your first application will be as rewarding as my first app, DIMENT (no, that is not an abbreviation for demented although at times I feel that way). DIMENT stands for dimension entity.
Cheers and good luck.