Bones, clones, and cyclones

My blogging has taken a nosedive in recent years, but I’m happy to report that I am doing great. I’ve been 100% focused on making sure there’s a viable alternative DWG platform for all you lost, lonely, and depressed CAD users out there. I’m going to keep this short and sweet, because as I write this I am still 100% focused on the task: putting finishing touches on BricsCAD V19 to be released “soon”.

I’ll get straight to the point. Yes, Bricsys has been acquired by Hexagon, but you would hardly know this if you worked inside Bricsys. Inside the company, the same people are doing the same work today that they were doing last month. Literally nothing has changed, at least not yet. Bricsys will change, yes, and nobody can be sure just how it will change, but I assure you that my focus will not change.

Look, the AutoCAD writing is on the wall. Life in the nursing home has not been kind to AutoCAD, and things are only going to get worse as Autodesk turns up the morphine drip. I’ve said for years that BricsCAD is the best alternative, and today it is more true than ever. To steal a line from Bricsys CEO Erik de Keyser, BricsCAD is not a clone, but a cyclone!

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Although my blog has become relatively stagnant, the rest of my life has been changing — and there are even bigger changes ahead.

My children have been growing into adulthood one by one, and my parenting time has been shrinking as a result. To take up the slack, I bought a bike a few years ago and started riding it on the many local bike trails. Initially cycling was a way to get healthy and enjoy the outdoors, but it has turned into much more. Riding a bike is great exercise, but it’s also a fantastic social activity when you do it with friends, and I have made many new friends in the very large and growing cycling community here in Ohio.

The last few years I’ve also been racing my bike competitively in the many amateur bicycle races held during the spring and summer. I never played organized sports as a kid, so this has given me an avenue to explore an unfamiliar side of myself.

While cycling has changed my life in many ways, even bigger personal changes are on the horizon. I’ve been divorced (or as I often say, “married to my bike”) for many years, but even that will be changing later this year — unless she changes her mind before we seal the deal.

In addition to the many personal changes, I’m also making some professional changes. I’ve accepted a contract offer to join the software development team of Belgium based Bricsys, maker of BricsCAD. I will continue my philanthropic work, including work on the OpenDCL project and my participation in online ObjectARX, AutoLISP, and C++ programming forums. I will continue maintaining and supporting ManuSoft software products. I will even continue blogging here and writing for upFront.eZine, but maybe my focus will shift a bit.

I’m looking forward to all these new challenges, and excited to see where this new road leads. Thank you for travelling with me!

Building a commercial grade lisp plugin installer in 5 easy steps

Rumors about the death of AutoLISP have been floating around for many years, but fear not, those rumors are greatly exaggerated. Bricscad and ZWCAD both have excellent support for lisp plugins, so well-written lisp code is truly cross-platform and enjoys a large and growing audience. Unlike other languages, the vast majority of lisp code works unmodified on any hardware architecture, in any version of Windows, and inside any host application that supports it, including AutoCAD versions released more than a decade ago. On top of that, OpenDCL gives lisp developers the power of a modern event-driven user interface that can put their lisp plugins on the same playing field as plugins written in any other language. This is a powerful combination, and given lisp’s low entry cost, it is not surprising to see lisp continuing to enjoy strong support in the developer community.

There’s just one thing missing: an easy way to install a lisp plugin on an end user’s computer. It’s a common refrain. How do you build a setup program for a lisp plugin? There are any number of free and low-cost installers available, but they are all designed for installing an executable program, not a plugin that must be configured to run inside a completely independent host application.

At one time there was a package called AcadInstall that was designed for AutoCAD add-ons, but that tool is long defunct. Autodesk has invented application bundles with the supposed benefit of making it easier to install and manage plugins, but these are not well documented and only work with recent versions of AutoCAD. For ManuSoft plugins, I use Visual Studio’s Setup and Deployment projects along with an extensive amount of custom C++ code to perform all the configuration necessary at install time. This works great for my needs, but it is well beyond the ability of most lisp developers.

After several recent online discussions with lisp developers struggling to get a working setup program, I set out to find a solution to this vexing problem. It turns out that after some initial work it’s actually not that hard to pull off a very professional looking setup program for a basic lisp plugin. In fact, if you follow these steps, in less than 10 minutes (5 minutes if you have a fast internet connection) you will have a working setup that installs a lisp plugin on any version of AutoCAD, Bricscad, or ZWCAD+. The best part: everything you need is free (as in beer)!

So, let’s get to it.

  1. Download and install Unicode Inno Setup QuickStart Pack from the Inno Setup Downloads page.
  2. Download my LispPluginSetup freebie and extract the files into a new folder somewhere.
  3. Download my LspLoad freebie and extract the files into a new subfolder named LspLoad.
  4. Double click on MyLispPlugin.iss. It should open in Inno Script Studio. Choose Project -> Compile.

At this point you should have a new Output subfolder with MyLispPluginSetup.exe inside. Go ahead, run it. After you’ve installed the MyPlugin sample, start the host application of your choice (the setup program configures all of them). If all went well, MyLispPlugin should display a command line message at startup alerting you to the fact that MYCOMMAND1 and MYCOMMAND2 are now available for use. Go ahead, try them. When you’re finished playing, it should uninstall cleanly (except for the new addition to TRUSTEDPATHS in AutoCAD 2014) when you choose Start -> MyCompany -> MyLispPlugin -> Uninstall My Lisp Plugin.

That was almost too easy, right? Well, not so fast. You’ll need to make some changes to adapt the sample for your own plugin. Take a look at the installation script in Inno Script Studio. Click on the Inno Setup Script item in the project tree to see the entire script as a flat file. Right near the top of the script, it should be obvious that you’ll need to change the basic plugin information preprocessor constants to adapt the script for your own plugin. Obviously your plugin will have a different base filename, and quite probably more files. It may have more registry keys and other basic setup stuff. In addition, you may not want to support all possible versions and flavors of each host app (in that case you’ll need to comment out or remove the associated item in the Files section). You get the idea, I’m sure.

Step 5 is modifying the sample script to adapt it for your own plugin. So easy, even an engineer could do it!