Technical

If you’ve been programming with ObjectARX for a while, you already know that each version of the ObjectARX SDK only works with a specific version of Visual Studio. Mazhar Basa touches on the subject in his article Components of ObjectARX Applications (http://www.dailyautocad.com/objectarx/components-of-objectarx-applications/). My VCBuildHook utility makes it possible to build for multiple target AutoCAD versions from a single Visual Studio 2005 solution, but this utility still needs the older versions of Visual Studio to be installed on the same system in order to perform its magic. The problem is, legitimate licenses of older versions of Visual Studio are hard to come by. Back in the Visual Studio .NET 2003 days, you could purchase a new license of VS 2003, then get a free license downgrade from Microsoft that allowed you to install Visual Studio 2002 side by side on the same system. That combination allowed you to target AutoCAD versions as far back as AutoCAD 2004. Unfortunately, Microsoft stopped offering the VS 2002 downgrade license when Visual Studio 2005 began shipping in November of 2006. The end result is that new ObjectARX programmers are faced with a dilemma if they need to target anything older than AutoCAD 2007. One of the attendees at my “High-Octane ObjectARX” class at AU 2006 reminded me that MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) members can download older versions of Visual Studio from the MSDN subscriber download center. I have verified that Visual Studio .NET 2002 (VS 2002) is available for download to MSDN Professional subscribers, but I could not find Visual Studio 6.0, which is required to target AutoCAD 2000 - 2002. Visual Studio 4.2 (required for AutoCAD R14) is available though, so maybe I’m just not looking in the right place. If you are a professional software developer, whether commercial or in-house, you should consider subscribing to MSDN for various reasons. If you’re an ObjectARX programmer and need to target older versions of AutoCAD, MSDN may be the only way to obtain the older Visual Studio build tools and libraries that you’ll need.

Not according to the press release (http://pressreleases.autodesk.com/index.php?s=118&item=161). Vista (and .NET 3.0) includes a built-in XPS Viewer (http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/default.mspx) (also available for Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003), which will view any XPS format (http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/downloads.mspx) file. Apparently Autodesk plans to add support for output to XPS format in the future, and this output will be called DWFx – a new file format. It’s not clear what the difference will be between DWFx and the output produced using the Microsoft XPS Document Writer (http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/viewxps.mspx) that is already available. I installed the Microsoft XPS Document Writer and XPS Viewer on my Windows XP SP2 machine. Next, I started AutoCAD 2007 and opened “3D House.dwg” from the Sample folder. I then plotted this file to DWF, PDF, and XPS, with the following results: PlotterPlot TimeFile SizeDWF6 ePlot.pc37 seconds139 kbDWG To PDF.pc35 seconds165 kb Microsoft XPS Document Writer34 seconds829 kb I’m not suggesting that these files all contain the same content, I’m merely suggesting that DWFx/XPS may have some undesirable tradeoffs in practice. This whole issue about “native Vista support for DWF” may be nothing but smoke and mirrors. There is no guarantee that publishing CAD data in the XPS format will be efficient. So what will happen if users can choose between a compact DWF, a slightly less compact but ubiquitous PDF, or a very space-hungry DWFx? Time will tell, but I think this issue of DWF in Vista is getting way to much spin and not enough critical analysis.

Some years ago I wrote a small ObjectARX module named VLXLoad that loads a .vlx file of the same name and in the same directory as the .arx module. I never claimed credit for the utility, but now that I’ve released the source code, I guess I’ll have to own up to it. ...