How can I develop a standalone application to insert AutoCAD blocks in 2d/3d environment

Question

I have developed lots of autocad plugins upto now but now the client wants to develop a stand alone application to insert 2d/3d autocad blocks and there will sure be some commands to edit or draw. How can I do that, where should I begin, what components will help me? Regards,

Answer 1

Somehow I don't believe your statement, "I have developed lots of AutoCAD Plugins" with the question you are asking. If you have that experience, especially lots, you should be familiar with the abundant resources on the internet for interfacing with the AutoCAD Drawing Environment via VB.NET.

Consider the resources offered by Autodesk.

Answer 2

I have created a standalone application with a WPF client that used the AutoCAD interop. You have to think in terms of COM interop instead of the more up to date, well-documented plugin libraries. You would need to install and reference the ObjectARX dlls and write your code to those APIs.

The new AutoCAD interface is well documented, but cannot run standalone. You may be able to combine interop, for starting the application, but for proper standalone you'll need interop.

For example to draw a line with interop you would use:

imports Autodesk.AutoCAD.Interop
imports Autodesk.AutoCAD.Interop.Common
'...
' start and end are instances of my own Coordinate class 
' that have a Point property which is a 3 element array of double for x, y, z coordinates 
ThisDrawing.ModelSpace.AddLine(start.Point, end.Point)

'where ThisDrawing is the application.ActiveDocument

One technique to code for future versions of AutoCAD (as long as they continue to support the Interop model) is to use a dummy project that references the ObjectARX dlls, and then a CAD class that abstracts all access to AutoCAD using objects (formerly variants, and dynamics in C#).

More information can be found at the AutoCAD Developer Guide