How to Write an Inventor Add-In

I’ve posted similar material previously but this is more complete and up to date.  The attached paper and code is from a presentation at this past Autodesk University.  I believe the paper can be used by itself and is not dependent on you having been at the presentation.  The primary focus is on someone that’s now using VBA and would like to move to add-ins, although it will also serve as a good general introduction for anyone that wants to learn more about add-ins.

The paper tries to answer the following questions:

1. What is an Add-In?
2. Why would you want to create an Add-In?
3. How do you create an Add-In?
4. How do you convert your VBA macros?
5. How do you execute an Add-In command?
6. How do you debug an Add-In?
7. How do you deploy an Add-In?

The languages used are VB Express 2008 and Visual Basic from Visual Studio 2008.  It also covers the differences you’ll run into between VBA and VB.Net.

Paper
Sample Files

Comments

[Tiago Brandão]

Hi i tried to build as in the the paper but the add-in doesnt appear on the list, i am using inventor 2011 and visual basic 2008 express.

[Yves Gingras]

Hi Brian

Thanks for this guided introduction to the creation of an Inventor AddIn.

Everything works fine for me but the registration. I cannot get the addin to load in every release of inventor on my workstation, neither on my colleague’s.

I you have a minute, could you take a look at a posting on the topic “AddIn; loads only in one Inventor release” in “Inventor Customization”, at Autodesk Discussion Groups? I’ve put a few facts concerning this matter.

If you ever think of something I could try, your help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Yves

[Brian Ekins]

You can debug an add-in using the steps described in the paper beginning on page 20.

[Tomas Nissila]

Hello!

What about the debugging? I tried to debug using Visual Basic 2008 Express and Inventor 2010. Then appeared next message:

---
A project with an Output Type of Class Library cannot be started directly.

In order to debug this project, add an executable project to this solution which references the library project. Set the executable project as the startup project.
---

Does it take extra operations/code trics to get to debug with Inventor process? I tried with one kind of them, but I got same problem message.

-TomasN