Outside The Box blogs, Autodesk University anecdotes, articles, blog digests, and product news in chronological order. See Writing for the same material by subject.
Recently I had to debug an intermittent access violation exception in one of my AutoCAD plug-ins. I needed to get the exception while the debugger was attached so I could break the process and analyze the state of memory before AutoCAD’s global exception handler got control. Unfortunately, sometimes it took several hundred runs before the exception occurred.
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AutoCAD 2015 includes a new feature called Application Manager. I’m sure it serves a lofty purpose, but it comes across a lot like the slimy Norton and Adobe updaters that are really just Trojans in disguise. It gets installed by default, with no option to prevent installation. To Autodesk’s credit, they do provide instructions for preventing installation of Application Manager, and instructions for removing it after the fact. Uninstalling requires several additional clicks, as if they really, really want you to think twice before taking such a drastic measure.
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Rumors about the death of AutoLISP have been floating around for many years, but fear not, those rumors are greatly exaggerated. Bricscad and ZWCAD both have excellent support for lisp plugins, so well-written lisp code is truly cross-platform and enjoys a large and growing audience. Unlike other languages, the vast majority of lisp code works unmodified on any hardware architecture, in any version of Windows, and inside any host application that supports it, including AutoCAD versions released more than a decade ago. On top of that, OpenDCL gives lisp developers the power of a modern event-driven user interface that can put their lisp plugins on the same playing field as plugins written in any other language. This is a powerful combination, and given lisp’s low entry cost, it is not surprising to see lisp continuing to enjoy strong support in the developer community.
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