Do you want to affect the direction of the AutoCAD developer documentation? Have comments you want to share with us about the AutoCAD developer documentation? If so, we want to hear from you.
A new AutoCAD Developer Documentation survey has been posted, and is an updated version of the survey that I had posted several years ago. You can access the new survey at the following URL:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/QXNH7VQ
The survey will be open from March 28, 2016 through May 31, 2016. This should provide plenty of time to respond to the survey. Feel free to share the link with other fellow developers, the more responses collected the better.
A few years ago, I was tasked with creating a road map for the AutoCAD developer documentation that would help to establish the future direction of the documentation. As part of that work, I created a survey that was sent out to the AutoCAD developer community; the survey provided great input and generated many more responses than I ever expected, 405 to be exact.
Some of the more interesting results from that survey are as follows:
- C# and AutoLISP are the top two popular programming languages of choice.
- Many developer's were not aware of the Sheet Set Object, Transmittal Object, Connectivity Automation Object, and CAD Standards Plug-in libraries that were introduced between AutoCAD 2000 through AutoCAD 2006.
- CHM and PDF formats were the preferred delivery formats for ObjectARX and Managed .NET documentation.
- Majority of developers were unaware of the ObjectARX and Managed .NET integrated help for Microsoft Visual Studio.
The work done on the developer documentation over the past few years has been directly influenced by the survey responses. Here are many of the high-level changes that were influenced by the survey:
- Developer documentation centric landing page - Page that lists the locations of the AutoCAD developer documentation in the AutoCAD product and on Autodesk.com.
- XML documentation for the Managed .NET libraries - Documentation enables the display of short descriptions for members and arguments in the libraries. The descriptions are displayed in tooltips within the code editor window and as part of the text in Object Browser.
- ObjectARX and Managed .NET Integrated Help - ObjectARX and Managed .NET reference documentation made available from the Microsoft Help Viewer in Microsoft Visual Studio. Improvements have been made to the content, content formatting, and search results.
- Managed .NET Developer's Guide - Content was expanded to cover more features (viewports, plotting, page setups, render presets, and more) and additional code samples were added.
- Managed .NET Developer's Guide offline - CHM file has been made available and is accessible as part of the ObjectARX SDK documentation.
- ActiveX and AutoLISP reference documentation - Reformatted and improvements made to the content.
- ActiveX Developer's Guide - Republished as a CHM file for offline access.
- ActiveX reference documentation - AutoLISP/Visual LISP code samples were added for most of the ActiveX code samples.
- Transmittal and CAD Standards Plug-in documentation - Now accessible from the AutoCAD product help, and has been updated with the inclusion of code samples.
I can't promise any changes will result from the responses collected, but as you can tell from the list of changes that your responses do have an impact on the AutoCAD developer documentation.
If you have any questions or comments, please to let me know and I will do my best to respond to them as soon as possible.
Sincerely,
Lee
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