AutoCAD 2005 and .NET

Hi there,

I'm relatively new to the AutoCAD programming world, but I have a rather
extensive software development background. I've been working with the .NET
assemblies Autodesk has included with version 2005, and have a few questions
in the hope that someone can point me in the right direction.

What I need to accomplish is this:

1. I need to create a 'command' that pops up a dialog allowing the user to
select a certain item.
2. Upon selection, I need to invoke a command to insert text with a leader
into the drawing, the text being determined by what the user selects.
3. I'd also like to be able to 'embed' some additional properties along
with each one of these text entities, that can be read at a later date.

I'm having a few problems. I have created my own .NET assembly that does
what I need in #1. However, just to test I sent the item text to the ACAD
commandline upon each selection. The problem with this is that my text
doesn't show up until I manually set the focus back to ACAD from my .NET
dialog.

The second issue is that I can't seem to find a way to programmatically
insert text with a leader using the .NET API provided. VBA provides the
ability to use 'GetPoint' to prompt for a point (ie the points of the
leader) but there appears to be no counterpart in the .NET API. Has anyone
done anything like this? Should I be looking at VBA/LISP/ObjectArx instead
to accomplish these tasks? I was hoping to avoid using COM Interop with
..NET since it is so _slow_ but I suppose that may be another way to go.

If anyone can point me in the right direction, it would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Fred Vandervelde