AutoCAD 2006 CUI Customization

As a company, we control all of our drawing production through the use
of menus and toolbars; over a number of years we have developed a vast
number of tools with a lot of coding behind it. We are looking to
upgrade from a mix of LT2002 and LT2005 to LT2006 in the next couple of
weeks and are concerned about the customization changes.

Is it possible to simply convert all the macros etc. currently held in
the .mnu files? We currently have one person, myself, modifying the
..mnu file whilst everyone else reads the .mns file once I have
recompiled it.

Is there anything that I particularly need to be aware of; we use
menus, toolbars and slide libraries, all off the menu file? To redo
this work would take months of redevelopment to understand a new
customization language and correct any errors whilst in the mean time
it takes twice as long to produce drawings and company standardization
would be lost.

I would be grateful if anyone who can advise on converting from 2005 to
2006 or who can point me in the right direction would reply to my
questions.

Many Thanks,

Lee

 

Any lisp statements or menu macros in your old mnu/mns files should
convert over to .CUI just fine. The key word being "should".... The
conversion to CUI seems to be picky and may give you some problems if
the MNU syntax isn't just right.

Rule 1: Make backups of everything, that way if something goes wrong you
can jump back one step and try again.

If possible, you may want to move some of your customization into the
associated .MNL file. If your menu is named "lee.mnu" (or "lee.cui")
then "lee.mnl" can contain your lisp statements and it will load
automatically when the menu is loaded.

Another advantage to this method is that if you make changes to this
code, the MNL file is just a lisp file which you can edit in any ASCII
editor. But if you had to make changes to the CUI, you almost have to
use the dreaded CUI editor.

 

Lee. not sure if this will help, but we set up Autocad 2000 on a laptop, had
it working to perfection, with all of our custom menus and toolbars, then
loaded Autocad 2006.
Using the 2006 Migration tool migrated everything almost perfectly. The only
problem I had was the old Acad.mnl (which had been modified) file would not
load. I changed it's name to custom.mnl and loaded it through the customize
interface in 2006. All worked perfectly. Once the bugs were gone, I could do
the install on all of our systems.

jojo