Hi, I am presently working for a fire truck industry. I am doing an automation project with solidworks and VB.NET. I have reliased that you have some good projects similar to this, Could you advise me or suggest me some good material where to start for interfacing the SW with VB.Net. Do you have some useful stuff to start of or any book you can suggest me.
Really appreciate your help Thank you
You should probably look for the SW API group. There are lots of samples and comments though this group. The API help, (which should be found on the under the start/sw/ also has a fair amount of samples that are a ver good place to start. Most of the samples are probably for VB6, but there should be only minor changes required to conver the code over to .net. As far as any 3rd part books for the API there are very few. One that I have found is "Automating SolidWorks 2006 using Macros" by Mike Spends. The approach to the book is to start recording a Macro, perform some functions, and then to view the code that the Macro generated. This is not a bad approach for getting started and the book is fairly clear and concise.
The other interesting thing is that SW itself can be fairly automated, which is why it is called a parametric solid modeling program. Most of the time VB programming is not even required other then to automate some internal SW funcions. What are you trying to do? There is a high probablility that a solid model can be set up with some equations/ relations that can automatically accomplish what you need.
Hope this helps,
Ed
Hi Ed, Thnaks for the reply. Actually trying to automate the product we do like a fire truck which has components like body, tank, pumphouse etc. so my goal is, using the vb.net get the front end take the all the critical dimensions from the model and derive the model using the requirments given. said that my initial goal is to call solidworks from vb.net for a simple part and that should give me confidence to drive the rest. so my inital goal is get a part driven from the vb.net take the parameters and create the model in SW. so i was just stuck where exactly to start, I am not familiar with vb.net but would like to learn the part required where I can interface with SW. Could you sugggest me or have any simple program or model driven from vb.net to SW Thanks Anil.
Ed wrote:
As far as VB, I have down loaded some parts off of the net that have basically generated the whole model from VB code. I am not sure but I think that PHD rotary actuators was one such part.
However, it doesn't sound like you need to do what you are trying to accomplish with VB. SW has all of the tools to accomplish families of parts and derived parts without any code. If you keep the "references" on between parts that are designed in the context of an assembly then by careful design the features of one part will effect the features of the others. An example of this would be that if a hole is "matched" from a hole in a previous part, that if the previous part is moved etc. the hole in the second part will also move and stay aligned. This function combined with various configurations of parts where individual features can be suppressed or unsuppresed should be able to do what you need. This all sounds complicated but ultimately it is easier to accomplish then by pure code. Another thing that you could look at is the master sketch approach, (at least what I call it). This is where a sketch, or series of parallel sketches are made where parts of the final assembly are constrained to entities on the sketch. Then by judicial use of dimensions and equations between dimensions the final assembly can be "configured" by modifying the "master" sketch.
If you do a little research on the key words that I have used you should find enough information to get you started, but I definately believe that you don't need VB code.
Hope this helps,
Ed
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