I am attempting to learn VB.Net scripting and it's all great fun. There's nothing like the tingly thrill of a dialog box popping up with the information you told it to show. In deciding to want to learn to develop little scripts I had to figure out if I needed to learn full-on Visual Basic before learning VB.Net. Turns out the answer is no. Thank goodness.
First, I downloaded Visual Studio Express 2008. It's free as long as you are just learning and not planning on selling your apps. If you are planning on being the next add-on king and selling your stuff, you'll need full-on Visual Studio 2008. That will set you back a mere $170.
There's great little videos introducing people to the Visual Studio Express interface on the MSDN beginners page.
The trouble with Visual Studio Express and wanting to play with AutoCAD is that you are not able to tell Visual Studio that you want to fire up AutoCAD when testing or debugging your scripts. So I downloaded this little gem, which sets up an "AutoCAD Managed VB Application" template for you. As long as you start new Visual Studio Express 2008 projects with that, you're good to go.
Once I had that going for me, I watched some Autodesk DevTV. Fenton Webb is the kindly voice behind the video. If you downloaded the AutoCAD Managed VB Application thingy you can disregard all the stuff about adding acdbmgd.dll and acmgd.dll as resources.
I had to pause a bunch and try things before it all sunk in. Don't even think about looking at this video before you do some of the MSDN beginner exercises.
Happy New Year, Lovelies!
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2 comments:
If you are going to program Civil 3D, you may want to take a look at this template available at this site:
http://civildev.com/downloads.php
I have not tried this download - but thanks. I'll give it a try, although templates created for VS 2005 need to be converted to work in'08. The template I use allows me to choose any version of Autocad I've got installed.
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