Design Automation: Visual Studio Project Templates for Inventor

Templates

All the installed templates are available when creating a new project.

• Open Visual Studio
• Create a new project (File → New → Project)
• Select "Visual C#" group
• Pick an installed template (e.g. "Design Automation for Inventor")
• Enter a name
• Click OK
• Rebuild Solution
• Open Task List (View → Task List) and complete all tasks

Design Automation for Inventor (recommended)

It is a multiple project solution. There are three projects: "Debug Plugin Locally", "Plugin project" and "Interaction project". It is recommended to start with this template.

Debug Plugin Locally

This project is used for debugging of a plugin. It starts a local Inventor, opens a document and runs the plugin. The project has to reference the plugin (Project → Add Reference). Use this template if you have a solution with a plugin which you need to debug (Add → New Project).

Interaction project

A sample project, which allows to post app bundle, activity and work item to Design Automation services by using [.NET SDK].

Plugin project

This template creates a new plugin which contains just the most important code.

To see an implementation of a plugin, visit design.automation.inventor-csharp-basics. There is a step-by-step tutorial which demonstrates how to upload the plugin and run a workitem on the server.

Disable or Uninstall Visual Studio Project Template for Inventor

If you want to disable or uninstalled Visual Studio Project Template for Inventor

• Open Visual Studio
• Create a new project (File → New → Project)
• Select "Visual C#" group
• Pick an installed template (e.g. "Design Automation for Inventor")
• Enter a name
• Open Manage Extensions (Extensions → Manage Extensions)
• Find Visual Studio Project Template for Inventor
• Disable or Uninstall it
• Close Manage Extensions dialog
• Close Visual Studio
• Click "Modify" button in the VSIX Installer dialog if uninstall Visual Studio Project Template for Inventor
• Close VSIX Installer dialog

Release Notes

1.0.15 (05/22/2024)

• Added support for Inventor 2025

1.0.14 (08/17/2023)

• New logo

1.0.13 (05/22/2023)

• Added support for Inventor 2024

1.0.12 (09/14/2022)

• Added support for Visual Studio 2022
• Added support for Inventor 2023

1.0.10 (10/07/2020)

• Updated Plugin projects to .NET 4.8
• Updated Interaction project to .NET Core 3.1
• Updating list of available engine list in Interaction project (See. Interaction/Publisher.Custom.cs)

1.0.9 (10/07/2020)

• Activity command line now has both appbundles and args in quotes (as required by a change on Design Automation).
• Interaction project now uses Autodesk.Forge.DesignAutomation release version 3.0.3 (rather than beta).

1.0.8 (08/20/2020)

• DebugPluginLocally now runs inventor in silent mode to better simulate real environment
• In order to support VS option "Place solution and project in the same directory" the plugins Output folder is now created outside of the Plugin project directory rather than on the solution directory level

1.0.7 (08/20/2020)

• Updated utilities NuGet to 2.0.0
• Added example of use for new extension class for NameValueMap

1.0.6 (10/11/2019)

• Add action to remove existed app bundle and activity
• Update doc about how to disable or uninstalled the template
• Support FORGE_CLIENT_ID and FORGE_CLIENT_SECRET env vars

1.0.5 (07/29/2019)

• added support of Visual Studio 2019

1.0.4 (06/13/2019)

• Use "native" way to create zip archive with bundle

1.0.3 (06/11/2019)

• VS2017 is minimal supported version

1.0.2 (06/05/2019)

• Added sample function to be used for onDemand downloads

1.0.1 (01/24/2019)

• added nugets into the extension

1.0 (11/12/2018)

• initial version