EULA EXTENSION OF CAPABILITIES

Hi Bentley,

I am starting a new blog on programming microstation, specifically using c# and/or vb.net, before encouraging people to use these languages with their interoperability into microstation, can you please provide clarification on the EULA point 15.

15. NO EXTENSION OF CAPABILITIES. You may develop your own applications that interoperate or integrate with the Software. Bentley prices its Software, among other factors, based on capabilities that we expose to you. You may not extend the Software to enable or unlock capabilities of the Software not specifically identified by Bentley as forming part of the specified end user functionality.

I have many examples of things that have cropped up over the years that clients have asked for, that could be addressed through an external tool suit created for microstation, but without clarification on what exactly constitutes a breech in the agreement, I am unsure of proceeding.

Some examples include:

creating a conform program that scans a drawing, prompts the user to either manually or automatically make the required changes in the drawing or the drawings in a directory - creating a report in either an sqlite database or excel file.

programmatically creating cells/cell libraries and having the cells placed in a drawing, again with either a database or excel output as an MTO.

Performing calculations outside of microstation and then instructing microstation to make the changes based on the results (this has come up in a few situations, eg: when using real world coordinate systems and transforming 3d elements in microstation, requires numbers so large it crashes microstation during the calculation, possibly because it is only a 32bit program, it makes sense to use a 64bit calculation program to do the grunt work and then pass the results back)

Thank you