AutoCAD Customization

What is AutoCAD?

If you're reading this, you probably already know that AutoCAD is the world's most popular Computer Aided Design (or Drafting) application. The first version of AutoCAD was released back in December 1982 and over the past 30 years it has evolved into a highly capable and extensible application.

AutoCAD comes in a number of discipline-specific ‘flavours’ (AutoCAD Architecture for example), the standard version of AutoCAD is often affectionately referred to as ‘Vanilla AutoCAD’ because it has no specific flavour.

AutoCAD is Autodesk's flagship product although the company own and actively develop a range of CAD applications including Revit, Inventor, 3ds Max and Maya. In the early years of the 21st Century, Autodesk's development of AutoCAD seemed rather lacklustre as much of their efforts were diverted towards more ‘modern’ building information modelling (BIM) applications like Revit. However, since the release of AutoCAD 2007, the application seems to be back in favour with its makers and the last few iterations of the product have seen substantial improvements, particularly in the user interface, 3D modelling and parametric drafting.

AutoCAD 2010