I’ve been a bit shy posting here recently, mainly due to a mountaineous pile of work, that at present shows no sign of abating.
My company’s mainly an AutoCAD shop and I’ve been using/testing AutoDesk’s various incarnations of AutoCAD 2008 (Civil 3D, Land Desktop Companion, Map and Raster Design) a fair bit. I can say I haven’t experienced so many Fatal Errors with a version of AutoCAD before, it seems mainly susceptible to drawings with images added as backgrounds, although I’m also experiencing regular crashes when printing to a network printer.
One feature I have been impressed with is Map’s ability to link to external GIS data using Feature Data Object (FDO), which AutoCAD released to the open source community back in 2005 along with MapGuide. As a test I linked a SHP file containing point objects and successfull applied thematic formatting to set the point’s colour based on attributes in a data column. I also added labels for the points description field and could format them to have a halo outline, which I’ve never seen in AutoCAD before. I achieved all this using the FDO interface, which was easy to figure out without trawling through the Help files.
I will really have to push into using DBMS to storing geometry to enable me to access the data from Manifold, AutoCAD Map, ArcGIS (if possible?) or any software that I choose. I can forsee the ability of doing all the GIS heavy lifting in Manifold pushing the results out to a DBMS and linking via FDO the geometry for my projects that need to be based in AutoCAD.
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