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We live in interesting times. Our regards go out to all of those who are affected by COVID-19. Indeed, our main office is located in Washington state, where most US-based COVID cases have occurred. Fortunately, almost everyone at CADSharp works remotely so you should see no change to how you do business with us.

Given the disruption to many peoples’ work and the general economic turmoil, we hope that our three-month access to CADSharp.com’s power user membership for only 99 USD will provide value to you during this time. This is the deepest discount we’ve ever offered with a membership. It does NOT include technical support access, but you will still have access to ALL of our online content at CADSharp.com.

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.

How To Get the Discount

If already registered at CADSharp.com:

1. Log into CADSharp.com
2. Go to the Videos page
3. Click Upgrade in the Member’s Area on the right
4. Choose 3-month membership
5. Enter the coupon code “learnapi”
6. Proceed with payment

If not yet registered at CADSharp.com:

1. Go to our Memberships page
2. Enter your user name and email
3. Choose 3-month membership
4. Enter the coupon code “learnapi”
5. Proceed with payment

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Stay safe and keep learning!

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!

Download

Download the Command Blocker installer here.

How It Works

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.

3DExperience World, formerly known as SOLIDWORKS World, has come and gone. We exhibited at booth 118 and had a fantastic time meeting hundreds of you from around the world. Keith Rice, our Technical Director, presented three times on SOLIDWORKS API topics. You can download the files for the presentations below:

<> Macros vs Addins vs Stand-Alones – [files][video]

<> SOLIDWORKS API for Total Beginners – [files][video]

<> Write A SOLIDWORKS Addin From Scratch – [files]

If you missed us and want to chat, please reach out to us.

See you next year in Nashville!

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