Who? Me?…PDMWorks Enterprise API Development Gotchas With .NET
June 18, 2008
A year or two ago I read a book that changed the game for me. The book was called .NET Gotchas and it made me about 10x more effective as a developer. The book details 75 common pitfalls with .NET development and explains how to avoid them. I was knee-deep in a few of those pitfalls when I found the book at my local library. In fact, I was at the library specifically to get help for a few problems I was having with a PDMWE Addin project that I was working on at the time. The addin was written for Read more
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Setting Up and Troubleshooting Your SolidWorks Add-in Development Environment. Take off, eh…
June 12, 2008
Writing Add-ins in SolidWorks can be tricky stuff as it involves class libraries, COM, interfaces, etc… It can be argued whether it is easier or harder in .NET (ease of use of .NET versus pain in the rear of COM Interop) but your good friends at SolidWorks set out to make it easy on all of us by creating Visual Studio templates for quickly creating SolidWorks Add-ins. Read more
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Free SolidWorks Add-In To Remind You To Eat Your Custom Properties
February 23, 2008
In spite of all their positive benefits, which are many, more than a few SolidWorks users look upon custom properties with the same disdain that a pre-schooler would have for green leafy vegetables. You can explain the benefits of custom properties, how they help you find things, how they lead to healthy drawing title blocks, how they improve PDM implementations, etc… until you are blue in the face and with some individuals you still won’t make a dent. There might be a change for a few days even a few weeks but inevitably you are back to files with no custom properties filled out.
In order to increase the life-expectancy of CAD administrators everywhere, I have posted a free .NET Add-In for SolidWorks that will “remind” your users to enter certain custom properties whenever they create a new file or save an existing one (after the initial save). The list of custom properties is configurable and
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Top Three Excuses For Not Switching To Visual Basic.NET (From Visual Basic 6.0 or VBA)
November 25, 2007
Because so many SolidWorks API users appear to use either VBA or Visual Basic 6.0 as their primary development environment, I thought a post about upgrading to .NET might be in order. There are endless possibilities for a topic even within that category but I feel that there are so many misconceptions about Visual Basic.NET amongst SolidWorks API users that it makes the most sense to use my little bit of time and real estate here to undo some of those misconceptions. Those who do SolidWorks API development for their actual job should already know these but individuals who perform SolidWorks customization through the API as their “secondary job” or as a hobby might benefit from the post.
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PDMWE API 201 - A Simple Addin To Pull Document Numbers On Demand
November 20, 2007
What Does This Addin Do?
This Addin “listens” for Command Button events to be “fired” from data cards in PDMWorks Enterprise. This could be File Cards (i.e. for existing files or folders) or Input Cards (i.e. for new files or folders). If the command string of the Command Button matches our criteria, then the Addin will pull the next Serial Number from a Serial Number sequence in the vault. The best thing about the Addin is that the Serial Number sequence name is specified as part of the command string. This means that the Addin can be configured very easily by a non-programmer to run on any number of different Serial Number sequences. In other words, our Addin is Extensible (sorry, I couldn’t resist).
Why Do I Need A Custom PDMWorks Enterprise Addin For Handling Document Numbers When PDMWorks Enterprise Already Has “Serial Numbers” Functionality That Handles This?
PDMWorks Enterprise is a great tool and the Serial Numbers functionality is very useful. However, as implemented in PDMWorks Enterprise, the Serial Numbers are kind of wired directly in to the system and don’t allow much flexibility in terms of when and how they are used. You either set your part number to be populated from the Serial Number sequence or you don’t. There is no “let’s do it this way for this case and another way for this other case.” By writing a very simple Addin, Read more
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