Introduction
I learned myself working with the SDK through trial and error. The fact that I had little experience in C++ didn't help me either. Eventually I found my way and hope to pass along some of that knowledge to those interested in developing.
This 3-series blog posts will guide you trough the basics of developing a Vectorworks plug-in with the SDK. As an example we will show you how to create the Guideline plug-in we offer in our VectorMEP module.
Make sure you've read the developer tutorial here which explains a lot of the basics.
First things first... what do we need to start ?
Programs to code and compile our code
Vectorworks runs on OsX and Windows. If you want your plug-in to work on both platforms you'll need to develop on OsX and Windows as well. Install the following program(s):
- Osx => Get Xcode
- Windows => Get Visual Studio
Installing the SDK library
You can download the SDK here. Note that there is a different package for each platform. Select the package(s) that fit your needs.
You can choose to extract these packages anywhere you wish. I chose to extract them into my Vectorworks user folder. This will make linking your output easier (relative) afterwards.
In the next tutorial we will create our first project.