Resources issue

[David Kurtz]

Hello,

When I wrote in VBA I did not have to think about where my resources are coming from.
Now, when I’m writing in VB.NET I do have to think where my resources are coming from.
At the site I’m working for we have (mainly) two types of AutoCAD installations, regular AutoCAD and mechanical AutoCAD (when the users I’m talking about are using the Mechanical AutoCAD they are using it in the Vanilla Profile.
When writing an application that using the AutoCAD resources it remembers the location of the needed resource and then when trying to use the application on a different type of AutoCAD, it can not find its resources.

Is there a way to go around it? Is it possible to “ship” the application with the recognized/needed dlls and to have AutoCAD Mechanical use the “regular” AutoCAD dlls?


Thanks in advance,
David.

[sinc]

This is a very vague question...

What "resources" are you referring to?

[BlackBox]

It sounds like David has written some code for Mechanical, which cannot find the mech. specific .DLLs when run on vanilla AutoCAD.

I'll offer the example of a Civil 3D solution finding AcDbMgd.dll, AcMgd.dll, but not the Aec*.dlls it may require (This assumes the imports are not copied local).

[sinc]

If you're referencing Mechanical-specific DLLs, then you're tying your application to only run on Mechanical. You can't just include a few DLLs with your distro to get around the problem; your user actually has to have Mech installed (and be using Mech, not "Mech as AutoCAD" or something like that).

If you want to write an application that works on either plain AutoCAD or Mech, then don't reference any Mech-specific DLLs in your application.

If you want a mix, and have an application with some features that should work in any flavor of Autocad, then one approach is to split up your application into separate DLLs. The first DLL would contain the generic Autocad stuff, and could be loaded into any version of Autocad. Then, if it detects it's being run in Mech, then it can load further DLLs containing all your Mech-specific stuff.