Pro/TOOLKIT: Setting up your environment in
VC++ .NET
by Vojin Jovanović, April 24, 2003
An Application Programmers Interface (API), Pro/TOOLKIT allows
Pro/ENGINEER functionality to be augmented and/or customized to meet the
specific needs of PTC's customer base using the "C" programming language.
Specifically, Pro/TOOLKIT provides the ability to customize the standard
Pro/ENGINEER user interface, automate processes involving repetitive steps,
integrate proprietary or other external applications with Pro/ENGINEER,
develop customized end-user application for model creation, design rule
verification and drawing automation.
Unfortunately, Pro/TOOLKIT deservingly gained a reputation of being hard to
work with. Such state of the affairs is the result of current PTC's vision which
dictates where and how this product ought to augment the functionality of
Pro/ENGINEER. This vision, as the series of the articles to follow will show, is
by no means "visionary" as toolkit users would hope for and rather leaves
quite a few features to be desired. In these articles we will explore what it
takes to work with this product as well as how one can go beyond what PTC
supports today.
A painful reality
Quite often one notices new users wanting to learn Pro/TOOLKIT
programming that rather too often get discouraged by a number of issues that
arise in their first days of struggle. One of the problems that a newcomer is
faced with is the setting of the proper development environment so that one
can work with Pro/TOOLKIT. The problem is so frequent that somebody by
now should have done something about it (especially PTC), unfortunately, to
my knowledge, as of today, nobody has.
The development of Pro/TOOLKIT applications does not look so ugly on Unix
OS since PTC has adequate support there for toolkit users and to work with
Pro/TOOLKIT is via make files (which is a normal way of doing things on
Unix), but it looks very ugly on Windows platforms where the support by PTC
is minimal and where the normal way of developing applications is with IDE
like Visual Studio. Therefore our focus in this article will be dedicated to
those new users who often post pleas for help in toolkit user groups related to
latter.
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