Hi,
I have published a blog article which explains hows to gain the maximum performance from the stand-alone application: SOLIDWORKS Stand-Alone API: do not compromise on performance
I have performed multiple experiements and the performance of stand-alone compared to add-in could be dropped in more than 800 times. The blog article explains the possible solutions of this issue.
Thanks,
Artem
Nice article, Artem Taturevich
I'm currently developing a Standalone which will have to (among other things) locate some assemblies from PDM and insert them in the factory layout e perform some operations, such as extruded cut in the respective floor.
Those subs, called from a Macro already wasn't as fast as I expected.
Maybe they will be even slower when executed from a standalone...
I might have to return to your article to some advice
Hi Alex, Madson. Thank you for the feedback. Yes, that was extremely slow for the second experiment. I have to put some Trace output to check if it is still alive as my initial thought was it is just deadlocked (it has eventually run for 50 minutes). I have also experimented with VBA macros (just didn't include it to the blog article) this was slower than add-in but much faster than stand-alone. I'm still not sure why the scheduling option still slower than add-in in some cases (even if it is much much faster than traditional stand-alone). I might need to do more research on that.
So, would you recommend for me to do something like building an "hidden" add-in with basic functions that my standalone will need?
Like, inserting model, making it virtual, creating a referenced sketch and make a cut extrude?
Hi Madson,
Yes, correct. This is the best option from my tests. As shown in this example: In-Process invoking of SOLIDWORKS add-in API from out-of-process applications
Are you developing in .Net? I haven't run tests for c++. Results might be different there.
Yes, I'm using VB.Net, since I've already a lot of stuff written in VBA (macros)...
My idea is to develop a software that works both as some sort of machine catalog, with information about each one of ours, and a "toolbox" for our engineering processes both in SW and in Excel...
Artem,
I just attended your API session at 3DExperience World 2020 and let me say that I was impressed with your XCAD nuget package for add-in development. As an intermediate step to an add-in, I wanted to take some problematic VSTA macro code and move it to a standalone application. The VSTA code as well as the standalone version of it were experiencing horrible performance. I am simply recursively traversing the components in an assembly to extract custom properties and in both the VSTA and standalone application. This is a small assembly (less than 30 items) and it was taking 13s just to traverse the tree (before property extraction). Your blog post mentioned using the CommandInProgress API call as a possible way to improve performance. In my case it took the traversal operation from 13s to 317ms. If you have performance issues in a standalone application, I suggest trying this first to see how much it may help with your performance issues before attempting the add-in calling approach.
Hi Brad,
Thanks a lot for attending my session at3DXW and kind words. I appreciate you have shared your story with stand-alone applications as this can be useful for developers who do stand-alone application and experience issues with performance.
Regards,
Artem
That's fascinating! I never thought that a stand-alone application would be so much slower to perform the same tasks, especially when using the API to communicate with Solidworks.