It’s good to be back now that Inventor 2013 is out the door. I ended up with my hands in too many projects this release and didn’t get much of a chance to work on the blog. A big thanks to Wayne for keeping it going.
Over the past few months my son has developed an interest in programming and I’ve been working with him on learning to program Inventor. I thought it might be useful to write up for the blog some of exercises I’ve gone through with him to help him learn how to program in general, and Inventor’s programming interface specifically.
Over the next several weeks I want to go through a lot of topics, each building on top of the other, to create a relatively sophisticated Inventor command. The command will be a new sketch command that creates a slot shape. I know there have been requests in the past to have this functionality in Inventor. Inventor 2013 does introduce new commands to create center point rectangles but it doesn’t yet address the creation of slot shapes, so we’ll create our own.
As we go through these exercises I want to focus on the Inventor API (Application Programming Interface) side of programming and am going assume you already know the basics of general programming. I know this is a big assumption and probably incorrect in many cases. It was also something that my son didn’t know and to help get him started I did some research to find a good book. The one I found and ordered for him I’m quite happy with and feel I can recommend it to others that are getting started programming or are a bit rusty in their programming skills. The book is Sams Teach Yourself Visual Basic 2010 in 24 Hours by James Foxall. It’s relatively inexpensive and is available on Amazon in both a printed and Kindle version.
If you’re new to programming, this is a simple way to get started and then being able to apply many of the basics you learn from the book as we begin writing the new Inventor command will help to reinforce what you’ve just learned by seeing practical uses for it.
-Brian
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