CAD Manager Channel

[tkindred]

Ok, Im lost. Ive searched for Information on creating a file for the CAD Manager Channel but can not find one. I know it XML but do not know this programming well enough. Does anyone use this feature? And if so, Can you show me how or send a file?

Thank you
Turner

[Opie]

Is this to be an automated channel? I'm just using an RSS feed from our intranet based database. Of course, it's not a file with an XML extension, so I cannot use it for the CAD Manager Channel. :banghead:

[dgorsman]

You set up the XML file to point to other files, which do not need to be XML format. For example, I have mine pointing to MS Word documents on the network. These pages have been helpful to me:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163989.aspx
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html

[dgladfelter]

As already noted you need an XML feed. There are many ways to do this, but among the easiest ways I have found is to use something like Wordpress. Wordpress is a blogging platform, that Word 2007 and the free download Windows Live Writer can publish to. More importantly, you can install it using all free software (Wordpress, Apache (web server), and MySQL (database).

Wordpress will create an XML "feed" of any post you make to the blog, and link to it.

We have not yet activated the CAD Manager channel in ACAD, but we do have a CAD Knowledge base that we post how-to's and such to. If you're not expecially savvy with web servers, but packages such as XAMPP and WAMP make the web server portion rather easy.

[dgorsman]

After some experience, I wouldn't recommend using the Communication Center at all in AutoCAD - there are known issues with it that have not been solved yet. Typically the process hangs during AutoCAD startup and doesn't terminate properly when AutoCAD is closed, leaving the WsCommCenter.exe and acad.exe processes hanging.

In the meantime I've kept the XML RSS format and done up something in LISP which emulates the CAD Manager Channel.