(Important: This guide is owned and distributed by SOLIDWORKS Corp, not CADSharp LLC, which is why we cannot provide it to you directly.)
When SOLIDWORKS Corporation needed a best practices document written for the SOLIDWORKS API, they came to CADSharp LLC. That’s why we’re extremely proud to present “SolidPractices: Getting Started with the SOLIDWORKS API”, a detailed, 36-page SOLIDWORKS API best practices guide written by our Technical Director, Keith Rice, and born out of nearly a decade of real-world, customer-driven SOLIDWORKS API development. Below is the table of contents:
1. Preface
2. Introduction
3. Programming Best Practices
1. Separation of Concerns
4. Program Type and Language Comparison
1. Choosing A Program Type and Language
5. The Macro Recorder
6. The SOLIDWORKS API Help
7. The SOLIDWORKS API Object Model
8. General SOLIDWORKS API Usage Advice
1. Version Interoperability
2. Naming SOLIDWORKS Variables
3. Early Binding SOLIDWORKS API Object Variables
4. Optional Arguments
5. Common Pitfalls
6. Troubleshooting API Calls
9. General .NET Development Best Practices
1. Installers
2. Versioning
3. Assembly Information
4. Primary Interoperability Assemblies (PIAs)
5. Source Control
6. Embed Interop Types
7. Error Handling and Program Termination
8. Logging
9. Remembering User Inputs
10. Message and Dialog Boxes
11. About Boxes and Help Pages
12. XML Comments
10. Addin Development Best Practices
1. Exposing the ISldWorks Pointer
2. COM Visibility
3. Addin Registration
4. Tools Suite Addins
5. Debugging Addins
6. Updating Addins
7. Architecting Addins
11. Stand-Alone Development Best Practices
1. Getting the ISldWorks Pointer
2. Testing If SOLIDWORKS Crashed
3. Calling An Addin From A Stand-Alone
12. Addin User Interfaces
1. User Interfaces
2. Launching User Interfaces
13. Stand-Alone User Interfaces
How To Get Your Copy
The guide is only available to those with a SOLIDWORKS subscription. If you do not have a subscription, please contact your Value-Added Reseller to become a subscriber, which provides you full-access to the SOLIDWORKS Customer Portal so that you can find the guide in the Knowledge Base under S-077636. Here is a direct link to the guide’s solution page, which will ask you to log in to solidworks.com.
Have any questions or comments? We’d love to hear them.
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Originally this discount was intended to be only for potential customers in nations with bad conversion rates against the US dollar. We know this has prevented many people from affording a membership in the past who might have liked to use our training. Given the current economic turmoil, however, we decided to extend the discount to all users.
CADSharp is pleased to present a new free tool called Command Blocker that blocks specific commands from running in SOLIDWORKS. Optionally, you can also run a macro in lieu of the default behavior, effectively overriding the command with your own custom functionality. This tool might be used by both users and CAD admins to prevent intentionally or accidentally using certain commands:
<> Custom property dialog
<> Addin dialog
<> Copy to Adobe Illustrator
<> Edit title block
As demonstrated in the video above, this is made possible by listening for the values of commands and then entering them in a settings dialog. This means that any command in SOLIDWORKS can be blocked — use with caution!
The secret sauce to this addin isn’t a secret for anyone who has taken one of CADSharp’s Advanced Program Development Using .NET training course. If you haven’t taken that class, I’ll still let you in on the secret: CommandOpenPreNotify event. By listening for this event, you can cancel the default the behavior and replace it with your own. You can see a open source example of such a listener here. The class containing the event listener is shown below:
The Next Level
If you can envision this tool being useful for your organization in some modified form then please reach out to us to discuss your needs. For example, if this were to be used by a CAD administrator then additional features might include:
1. Preventing users from accessing the Settings dialog
2. Allowing the Settings dialog to import blocked commands from a list kept on a server.
Reach out to us if you’re ready to take Command Blocker to the next level. Until then, thanks for checking out this tool and don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter below so you can learn about more products like this.
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