What references do I need to get this application working with MicroStation Connect. I'm currently referencing Bentley MicroStation 1.x Object Library 10.1. Application works fine with SS2 and SS3.
Mike Watson said:What references do I need to get this application working with MicroStation Connect
Get hold of the MicroStation CONNECT SDK. It provides libraries for .NET and many examples. Those examples mostly have Viz Studio projects with all the references you need.
Mike Watson said:I'm currently referencing Bentley MicroStation 1.x Object Library 10.1. Application works fine with SS2 and SS3
The APIs in CONNECT are very different to V8i. In particular, .NET has first-class support these days in CONNECT.
Regards, Jon Summers LA Solutions
Jon Summers said:Get hold of the MicroStation CONNECT SDK. It provides libraries for .NET and many examples.
I wish I could do that. Requires a BDN membership.
Rod WingSenior Systems Analyst
Rod Wing said:I wish I could do that. Requires a BDN membership.
Because only few people are willing to discuss this issue publicly (and all other complain privately or not at all), nothing will change in my opinion, because from Bentley perspective, everybody are happy (expect few notorious complainants, like me).
BTW For SELECT / OpenAccess / or how it's called now program, for internal company use BDN membership is free. But it still requires to sign some paper(s), which is often a magnitude bigger problem than to find free budget.
Funny thing is that in the meantime, when Bentley have tried to make developers' life as complicated as possible (and motivate them to use competitive platforms), other people simply put documentation to web ;-) (I guess it comes from some older version).
Regards,
Jan
Bentley Accredited Developer: iTwin Platform - AssociateLabyrinth Technology | dev.notes() | cad.point
Rod Wing said:I wish I could do that. Requires a BDN membership
Can't EnvisionCAD apply for BDN membership? Is that a cost issue (I almost abandoned Bentley two decades ago when they proposed a very high entry fee $5,000 for ISDs).
Jan Šlegr said:... from Bentley perspective, everybody are happy except few notorious complainants
I'm happy to complain notoriously along with Jan!
It isn't the cost of the BDN membership that's the issue as much as the terms of the agreement and the information that needs to be provided. Our company feels the financial information required to be provided to Bentley is too intrusive and is not willing to divulge that information.
As for the free BDN membership, that is only for internal application development. We are primarily consultants and do very little internal development so that is a no-go for us as well.
Rod Wing said:It isn't the cost of the BDN membership that's the issue as much as the terms of the agreement and the information that needs to be provided. Our company feels the financial information required to be provided to Bentley is too intrusive
That's a pertinent comment. I was unaware of Bentley's interest in the commercial aspects of a BDN member.
The free membership isn't even all that helpful to casual coders like myself.
When I try to go to Administration and ask them to sign off on the free SDK access, the first thing they ALWAYS ask me is "why do you need that?" And I have no answer, because I don't know what's in it and I don't know what I might be able to learn from it. I WANT to have access to the resources and I WANT to learn what I might be able to develop with it - but until that happens, I have no justification I can bring forth for my company to sign this extra paperwork.
MaryB
Power GeoPak 08.11.09.918Power InRoads 08.11.09.918OpenRoads Designer 2021 R2
It's basically all the development documentation for the Microstation objects along with example code. You don't have to be online to use it.
But I do have to be part of the program to even look at it, don't I?
You can't access the SDK to download the documentation, example code, and other resources unless you are a BDN member.
MaryB said:When I try to go to Administration and ask them to sign off on the free SDK access, the first thing they ALWAYS ask me is "why do you need that?"
Tell your manager that you want to improve your skills. You want to raise your personal productivity. Ask Administration if it's in their remit to put up barracades to restrict company profitability.
MaryB said:I don't know what's in the SDK
The SDK doesn't include build tools for either .NET or C++. You need Visual Studio.
MaryB said:I want to learn what I might be able to develop
The documentation is terse and unhelpful. The examples are worth their weight in gold.
MaryB said: I have no justification I can bring forth for my company
You will be able to create tools that make your work more focussed on company workflows and hence more efficient.
VBA is delivered with MicroStation and is not part of the SDK. It's a complete, self-contained Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool. For many simple requirements, VBA provides what's needed.
VBA falls down in several areas:
Jon Summers said:Tell your manager that you want to improve your skills.
You have not worked in an enterprise, isn't it? ;-)
It's not only that rational arguments are not accepted and do not work often, but as Rod Wing mentioned, to share information and to sign anything is unsolvable problem :-(
Jon Summers said:The SDK doesn't include build tools for either .NET or C++. You need Visual Studio.
It's not precise enough in my opinion: For NET development, no Visual Studio is required. Even simple Notepad is enough (but e.g. VSC is for sure better ;-), compiler/linker is part of free NET Framework SDK. Also SDK itself is not mandatory, because all assemblies are already part of MicroStation installation (but I agree it's impossible to develop anything without examples and documentation).
Jon Summers said:For many simple requirements, VBA provides what's needed.
I would agree with this. If you go this route, check out the View-Object Browser
and the Tools-References menu options. You have to have a library referenced in order to get the context sensitive help. Once you reference a library like Excel you can go to the Object Viewer to see what type objects are available which can give you some clues on what to do a web search on.
Scripting is all your system objects (i.e. files, folders, read and write text files)
DAO and ActiveX Data are your database libraries.