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Come See Us At SolidWorks World

Jeff Cope — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 08:49:21 +0000

Extensible CAD will be exhibiting in booth #2 at SolidWorks World this year. We will be showing InspectionXpert for SolidWorks, InspectionXpert First-Article and Office2PDM. InspectionXpert is software that automates the creation of first article inspection sheets from CAD drawings. Office2PDM is an addin for MS Office that enables you to work with Enterprise PDM from inside of Word, Powerpoint and Excel.

I will also be presenting personally on Enterprise PDM Customization on Monday at 1:30pm. Unfortunately they scheduled me at the same time as Joy Garon’s What’s New In EPDM 2009 but that is just how it goes. Stop by my session if you can and if not, then stop by our booth and say hello.

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SolidWorks API Presentation – Beginner’s Guide To The API

Jeff Cope — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:40:11 +0000

From time to time I do presentations on the SolidWorks API and one that gets requested fairly often is the Beginner’s Guide To The API. I just presented this in Roanoke, VA at the Blue Ridge SolidWorks User’s Group headed up by Jeremy Marks. They were a good bunch of guys (although there was a University of North Carolina fan in attendance) and it seems like a well-run group. However, after risking my life to get there by driving through what seemed the rain-storm of the century on unfamiliar mountain highways with almost no visibility I have decided that in the future it might be safer for me to simply make the presentation available on my blog : )

beginners-guide-to-the-api

Also, the SolidWorks Autonumbering Macro (w/ MS Access Database) that I usually show has been written up for ConnectPress with a link to download the Macro and Database. You can view that article here:

http://www.solidworkscommunity.com/feature_full.php?cpfeatureid=32314

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EPDM Number Generator…Updated For 2009

Jeff Cope — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 07:04:21 +0000

Due to blackmail and extortion a request from my good friend Rohizzle, I have updated the popular Number Generator to work with 2009. I have not made any enhancements so you can refer to the previous version’s post for instructions.

Net: This is an addin for SolidWorks Entperprise PDM that enables users to pick, at run-time, the numbering sequence to use for auto-numbering.

2009 Version Download

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Setting Up and Troubleshooting Your SolidWorks Add-in Development Environment. Take off, eh…

Jeff Cope — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 05:31:31 +0000

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. The templates are packaged with the SolidWorks API SDK, support VB and C# and are analagous to having a SolidWorks part template that already has some geometry in it, custom properties, material assigned, etc… When it was introduced back in the day, it was a Godsend. It does have its issues from time to time though. For some reason, I have had trouble deploying both on SolidWorks 2007 and 2008. The SolidWorks API SDK installer runs without errors but when I attempt to create a new SolidWorks Add-in, I see this unfriendly message:

The I have spoken to a few other developers and concluded that I am not the only one so I decided to write a post on it. Besides, I go through this everytime I have to reinstall SolidWorks, which is just often enough to be a real pain but not quite often enough for me to ever remember the steps to fix the issue. I should admit then I am writing this as much for myself as I am for you. Here goes…

The Cause:

Based on the error message, you might get the impression that this is a trust or security issue. That might lead you down a path of signing the dll with a strong name, configuring .NET security policy on your machine, etc… (i.e. the path to frustration). To find the real cause, we must examine the Global Assembly Cache, GAC, to take a look at this SolidWorksTools dll file. The GAC is where shared .NET assemblies are placed so that they can be made available to other applications. On Windows XP, the GAC is located at “C:Windows\assemblies\”. Taking a look at the GAC, we see that it contains a different version of the SolidWorksTools dll file than that which is expected by the SolidWorks Add-in Template for Visual Studio. The version in the GAC is version 2.0.0.0 and not version 1.0.0.1, which is what the SolidWorks Add-in Template for Visual Studio is looking for.

If we take a look at the template itself, then we can see where the version is specified for the SolidWorks Add-in Template for Visual Studio. FYI, the template is contained in a zip file (SWVBAddin.zip for Visual Basic) which in turn is contained in the “…Templates\Project Templates\” folder of your Visual Studio 2005 directory. Note: I have Visual Studio 2008 but it is still in the box so I’ll let you know once I try it if the templates go in the same place.

The zip file contains various bitmaps, icons, classes and modules as you would expect to see in an Add-in but it also a file called VBAddin.vstemplate which is a Visual Studio template file. Once you open it, you see that indeed a different version of the SolidWorksTools dll file has been specified than the one which is installed in the GAC. .

In theory, one should be able to update the VBAddin.vstemplate file above to refer to the insalled version of the SolidWorkTools dll file. One of my favorite philosophers once explained why this might not work for me:

”In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” – Yogi Berra

What I do is just to uninstall the SolidWorksTools dll file in the GAC (right mouse button on the file in the GAC and select uninstall) and replace it with the version 1.0.0.1 file that SolidWorks API support gave me the first time I ever reported this issue (a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…) . You can do this by simply dropping the file in the GAC folder (e.g. C:\Windows\assemblies).

Once you add the version 1.0.0.1 SolidWorksTools dll file to the GAC, you can go into Visual Studio and attempt to create a new SolidWorks project from the SolidWorks Add-in Template for Visual Studio.

And it works! Now you can begin writing that Add-in (i.e. the one that is now a few days late while you fought with the SolidWorks SDK).

Note: For any SolidWorks Add-ins that were previously compiling using the 1.0.0.1 dll, you will have to change your Visual Studio Project to reference the newer version.

Good luck.

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Fun With SolidWorks Equations

Jeff Cope — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 14:40:33 +0000

Disclaimer: This post isn’t directly API-related but using logic statements in SolidWorks equations is so useful that I decided to post it. Also, the syntax is in a kind of “techno-weenie-ese” so I thought I would help folks with the syntax.

The SolidWorks equation editor is a very useful, powerful and yet easy to use tool for building design intent into your SolidWorks model. However, most people don’t take full advantage of its power. In addition to support for constants, which are nice, the equation editor allows If…Then type logic statements. The idea is that you can set a dimension’s value to one of two values depending on the veracity of a logic statement pertaining to another/other dimension(s). Say what?….

Time for an example…

Let’s say I have dimensions A, B and C. I want to set C = 4 if A+B<5. If however, A+B>=5 then I want to set C=8. This is relatively easy to do using the the IIF statement (if statement to lay people). The syntax is like this: IIF([test statement],[value if true],[value if false]). In our example above, the statement would look like this: IIF(A+B<5, 4, 8). Pretty simple, right? I thought so. In SolidWorks, it would look like this: d2@extrude1=IIF(“d1@sketch4″+”d2@sketch4″<5, 4, 8).

As the example video below shows, IIF statements can be extremely powerful in conjunction with the Instant3D functionality that was added in SolidWorks 2008. Notice how the hub diameter and number of spokes is updated real-time as I drag the ID accross the 3.00in threshhold.

You may download the example file show from here.

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