Cut to fit, patch to match

Caulk and paint cover anything. I’d hate to know the details surrounding the creation of software – it’s gotta be ugly.

You know I love Vista – about as much as I love stubbing my toe on the bedpost at 4am; rumors are Microsoft will be coming out with a service pack in Q1 of next year – I’m looking forward to it. Being on the cutting edge is one thing – be careful of the bleeding edge of anything.

I tried the Content Browser yesterday for the first time in a while. I was looking for a mill and level subassembly for a runway project, but the rehab subassemblies aren’t located on a tool palette by default. Of course the .net .atc subassembly catalogs can be dragged and dropped onto a new tool palette, but I wanted the Content Browser to work.

Problem is, we sync our local machines with a server, so My Documents actually reside on \\Servername – yup, a UNC path to My Documents. And of Course in Vista, My Documents has become simply “Documents.”

A few other changes have been made as well (few is an understatement):

Application Data = C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming
Local Settings = C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local
My Documents = C:\Users\Username\Documents

Anyway – to make a long story short, apparently the Content Browser in Civil 3D running on Vista can’t resolve a UNC path, so when I selected Catalog from the General menu, nothing happened. No error message, no blinking lights – nada. If you’ve ever talked to Tanya at Autodesk, the girl is just sharp. She turned me onto a command line call to initiate the Content Browser from Windows:

C:\Program Files\AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008\aeccb.exe “C:\Users\scottm\Documents\Autodesk\My Content Browser Library\ACA 2008\ContentBrowserLibrary.cbl”

But it WON’T work if you substitute a UNC path such as \\servername for C:\

So I’m on a hunt. I’m looking through the registry, searching through files, trying to trick the program any way I can, and found this little gem: The Content Browser comes with ADT – I mean Architectural Desktop, I mean Autodesk Architectural Desktop, I mean AutoCAD Architecture. In the root directory of the install is a ContentBrowser.ini file with the following statement:

[Files]
Library=C:\Users\scottm.domainname\Documents\Autodesk\My Content Browser Library\ACA 2008\ContentBrowserLibrary.cbl

Civil 3D doesn’t have the .ini file, so I made one and placed it in the same directory as the acad.exe file (C:\Program Files\AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008) and Voilà!

Cut to fit, patch to match.

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