From the course: AutoCAD: Building Add-ins with C#

Setting up your environment - AutoCAD Tutorial

From the course: AutoCAD: Building Add-ins with C#

Start my 1-month free trial

Setting up your environment

“

- [Instructor] To begin our very first AutoCAD .NET plugin project within Microsoft Visual Studio, we need to have the correct files that will reference the AutoCAD .NET application programming interface. Oftentimes, the application programming interface is referred to or abbreviated as API. So how do we get the AutoCAD .NET API files that we need to work with? Well there's at least three required libraries. We're going to see where those libraries are. Libraries are going to have the extension DLL for the managed type work that we're going to do within .NET. The DLL actually stands for dynamic link library. Thus oftentimes they're referred to simply as libraries or DLL files. We're going to take a look on the screen and see those three required DLLs for our .NET application. So we're going to go into the object ARX SDK, the INC directory, and we're going to sort by type, and there are a few that you need. One, AC Core MGD, two, ACDB MGD, and three, AC MGD. The AC stands for AutoCAD, and the MGD stands for managed. So what we're looking at is the .NET, or managed library for AutoCAD within the API. Those are the three that kind of link or plug in that connect to the AutoCAD .NET tools that we can. There's other optional reference libraries that we can use, and build, and take advantage of additional tools within the AutoCAD .NET API, besides the base three that you see highlighted on the screen now. Now all of these, as you can see, are available within the Object ARX SDK, or software development kit. So that's the next question. Where do we download the Object ARX SDK, or software development kit? Well, you go to your AutoDesk.com website, so I'm gonna type in autodesk.com, and the location where that is stored changes sometimes as AutoDesk continues to revise its website. But if you type in /developautocad, then it will forward you to the correct location as you see it changed the path once it forwarded it to the correct location at the current time. Now if we scroll down, this is the page that shows us all of what we can use, all the tools to develop within AutoCAD. Even has a training labs where we can walk through, we're focused on .NET, it's gonna walk us through a training lab. So another place to go to build up your knowledge base of how to work with AutoCAD .NET. If you keep on scrolling it talks about documentation, that's the help, and a lot of the help now is located online, so you can click on any of these links and it will take you to an online location for the help files. What we're working toward is the managed, or .NET, information. It says the components of the managed .NET documentation are installed as part of the ObjectARX SDK. That's what we're looking for. You click on this link, it'll take you to a place where you can download that SDK, or software development kit. Now you're going to need that software development kit to be able to continue through the rest of the course. As you work through all of this, just download what you need, but also notice as you scroll on down, there's an excellent tool down here. And we're going to use this tool within the Visual Studio community software that we're building our code in. It's a wizard, and it's going to help us link the tools that we need really quick. It's gonna help us build our project for us, through this wizard type interface. So I encourage you to go ahead and do that. We wanna make sure we get the right one. I was floating over the ObjectARX, we're looking at the .NET wizard. So you download that, and we'll plug in, and we'll work with Visual Studio 2017. Even the community version for that. So we can take advantage of the SDK, we're gonna download the SDK, through the link up here. And then we're going to download the wizard from the link down here. Once you have both of those installed, we'll go on into the next video and start working on creating our very first Visual Studio project.

Contents