Visual Basic Forum for Visual Basic Programmers VB - Interactive Visual Basic Forum .NET Programming & Help

jc_cpuse · Newbie Joined: 16 Sep 2005 Posts: 1

Hi, I'm joener a 5th year Software Engineering student here at Central Philippine University Philippines. I just want to ask about our thesis project.
Our project is to develop a software that will be use by eletrical engineers in creating the electrical plan of a certain house, building or any infrastructure. The propose software will alow the user to select what kinds of bulb they will use the user can also select kinds of appliances they intend to use in theri house such as aircons, TV, Radio, Electric/Ceiling fans, etc. The software will then calculate the exact illumination of the house and the total number power of generated by the house. A report similar to the electricl plan produce by Electrical Engineers manuaaly will be generated.
With regards to this I just want to ask if how can we generate a report from visual basic and it will be save as a CAD file or in any format that we will be able to save and print it similar to the electrical plan?

Thanks.

dougthomas · Posted: Sep 17th, 2005 05:05 AM Post subject:

Hi Joener and welcome to the Forum,

Without knowing in much more details what the "Report" might look like it's difficult to answer. On a general note, VB has various capabilities for Drawing and a specific set of libraries for animation, 2D and 3D modeling (called Direct X). So if you want to display the cable runs visually and even "walk through" the building, Direct X is probably a solution. There's more information at :

[link]

I think it would be fair to say that Direct X is *mostly* used for games Programming but I wuld think that its features would be of interest to you. There is a Direct X Software Development Kit available BUT I believe it's only available for VB.NET, there used to be one available from Microsoft for Visual Basic but it would appear that they do not want to support VB. (I have an old copy of the SDK for VB which I could zip and e-mail you if you want to see what's in it)

If you are thinking of written reports, VB has direct access to Microsoft Word, Excel and Access so it's *quite* a simple task to produce reports in those formats from VB.

Regarding CAD formats. As far as I know there are no native features within VB to generate a given CAD interface. You would have to do that for yourselves. The difficult part may be obtaning a definition of the interface from a given CAD vendor ! (they tend to be propriority, although there may be an ISO / ANSII standard - I just don't know) Some may define a flat file interface which may have to be preprocessed. It may be worth your while looking around the Internet for CAD information and see what turns up.

Sorry not to have been more helpful, but I hope this helps.
Good luck with the project - sounds very interesting

Regards
Doug
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