Solid Edge ST7 SDK
Programmer's Guide
Welcome to the .NET Programmer's Guide for Solid Edge. This book was written in an effort to enable .NET developers to quickly get up to speed with automating Solid Edge. Learning the Solid Edge API can be a monumental task in itself. It takes most people several years before they feel comfortable with the API. The most important thing to remember is that it takes time and effort to fully understand and appreciate all of the techniques that this book will cover.
While there are many .NET programming \ scripting languages that can be used, I will focus primarily on Visual Basic .NET and C#. Other than syntax, there are relatively few differences between Visual Basic.NET and C#. A good example of this is the Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD) exam. There is not a Visual Basic.NET version and C# version of the exam. There is only one version that asks questions for both languages. The reason is, from a .NET framework point of view, if you know how to use the framework in Visual Basic .NET, then you also know how to do it in C#. For this reason, focus of this book will be in the Visual Basic .NET environment with C# specific examples where necessary.
This book is for anyone wanting to learn how to automate Solid Edge using .NET programming languages. While prior programming experience will indeed help, it is not necessary. The goal of this book is to enable developers new to Solid Edge programming to quickly get started. There will be an abundance of source code examples to learn from.
If you are a Visual Basic 6.0 programmer and new to Visual Basic .NET, there are new concepts that you’ll need to learn. While Visual Basic 6.0 was written with COM programming in mind, Visual Basic .NET was written with .NET in mind. COM and .NET are two completely different architectures that don't natively understand each other. They must interact via an "Interop" layer. This interop layer can be a source of much pain and frustration if not understood properly. One of the goals of this book is to save you a significant amount of time and frustration learning these new concepts.
It is normal for programmers new to Visual Basic .NET to expect the ability to upgrade their legacy code. While Microsoft does provide a Visual Basic Upgrade Wizard, it is often the case that the code does not work as expected after the conversion. There are well documented reasons on MSDN as to why this happens. While this can be very frustrating, you might consider this an opportunity to write your code from scratch, learning the new concepts along the way.
For a complete list of language changes, please refer to Language Changes for Visual Basic 6.0 Users.
This book targets Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology and the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0. The .NET 2.0 Framework SDK is freely downloadable at MSDN Downloads.
The examples and screen shots from this book will be from Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or 2008. You may use any edition of Microsoft Visual Studio that meets your specific needs. While not covered in this book, you can also use alternative IDE's like SharpDevelop.