More about affordable custom solutions: ". . .At $695, I can offer my customers a P&ID package that includes Vdraft. Vdraft's price [$495] is low enough to allow all designers and engineers to have a copy on their computer. . .I'm giving the user the full functionality of Vdraft plus anything I add to it in my third-party add-on package, and making it as functional as I can to aid the designer. Everybody's getting it at a price that's affordable in today's environment. To me, this a giant leap forward from where a lot of other CAD packages are right now."
Bill Plummer, President, GMP Company
On Vdraft's easy programmability: ". . .The Vdraft Automation classes were well laid out and followed the DXE library closely. Since I have been using DXE for a couple of years, the transition to Vdraft ActiveX Automation was easy. However, even without DXE experience, Vdraft would be easy to program since it just makes sense. For instance, if you want to know where a circle (or most other entities) is located, you call GetWhere(). If you need to know how many linestyles there are, you call GetCount(). Very logical and easy to remember. . .[Vdraft's ActiveX Automation implementation] is much faster than other ActiveX implementations I have used. . ."
Scott Taylor, President, Tailor Made Software
Program integration: ". . .The thing I especially like about Vdraft is, number one, it is written in Microsoft Visual C++, which is also true of the Vdraft API. I'm using Visual Basic 5.0 for my customizing. Now I can't quite get to all the same 'guts' that the Vdraft developers can get to. But at the same time, I still feel I can get close enough that there's very little I can't access and manipulate. Consequently, I feel that the integration will be much better than the integration I can get with AutoCAD. Here again, AutoCAD's going this same direction. They're opening up their interface. One of the things I looked into last year was doing the AutoCAD OEM program for a project at Hoechst Celanese, but their interface to their product just wasn't as refined as Vdraft's."
Bill Plummer, President, GMP Company