DEROTAG

Showing Current Selection in a Modeless Form There is a question post in the AutoCAD .NET discussion forum here. I happened to have a similar requirement in one of my recent development projects. So, instead of post a reply in the discussion forum there, I though it would be easier to post a relatively simple and run-able project for the benefit of all readers. The project is fairly easy and is comprised of 3 classes. Class CurrentSelectionWatcher : using  System; using  Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices; using  Autodesk.AutoCAD.EditorInput; using   CadApp  = Autodesk.AutoCAD.ApplicationServices. Application ; namespace  ShowSelectionChange {      public   class   CurrentSelectionWatcher     {          private   frmSelection  _view =  null ;          private   bool  _show =  false ...

Showing Progress for long code execution in AutoCAD More often than not we need to write code to loop through large amount of data set, such as entities in a selection set or even entire ModelSpace/PaperSpace of a huge drawing. This process may take a while to complete. It is a common practice to show a progress bar during this lengthy processing to let user know that AutoCAD is busy processing data. With AutoCAD .NET API, one can quite easily uses the built-in Autodesk.AutoCAD.Runtime.ProgressMeter object to show progress of lengthy executing process. However, from my experience of using ProgressMeter, it often does not show a satisfactory progressing visual effect. The processing effect shown by the ProgressMeter for exact long processing operation done by the exact code could be different from one AutoCAD version to another version, and in many cases, the progress meter simply does not get refreshed during the lengthy processing. A few years back, I wrote an article on showing a pro...

Showing and Closing Modeless Form Dialog Box With System Windows Forms Form When programming AutoCAD, there are 2 styles of dialog box can be shown: Modal Dialog Box and Modeless Dialog Box . Modal dialog box is usually used for collecting user inputs, while modeless dialog box is more focused on showing information. While the dialog box displayed, modal dialog box blocks user from direct interaction with AutoCAD (that is, user cannot interact with AutoCAD UI until the modal dialog box is dismissed. But it DOES NOT mean AutoCAD stops its processing until the modal dialog box is closed), modeless dialog box floats on top AutoCAD UI and user can still interact with AutoCAD UI. With AutoCAD .NET API, one can use either Windows Form or WPF Window as dialog box. This discussion is limited to Windows Form, because it is still used far more often than WPF window. System.Windows.Forms.Form class has 2 methods to show a form: ShowDialog() and Show(). The former shows a form as modal form and t...