Inventor® Power Tools

Inventor® Power Tools is a collection of productivity tools for Autodesk Inventor® 2012, distributed as an add-in. It automates some common, repetitive tasks, like generating drawings for each part in an assembly.

After generation, each drawing is left open in the editor, giving the engineer the opportunity to further adapt them, if necessary.

Forking and compiling from source

Since Autodesk Inventor® 2012 is built on the .NET Framework 3.5, the project targets .NET Framework 3.5. This framework is not installed by default on Windows 8, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, meaning you need to install it manually in order to compile from source. Installing the .NET Framework 3.5 on Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 explains how to do this.

Using this method didn't work for me on Windows 10, but I managed to install .NET Framework 3.5 using the DISM.exe tool. See Can't install .NET 3.5 on Windows 10 on StackExchange for more information.

Installation

Each release contains a .txt file with installation instructions.

In summary:

1. Close Autodesk Inventor®;
2. Extract the contents of the ZIP file to directory C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\Inventor 2012\Addins\;
3. Start Autodesk Inventor®.

Debugging

To debug the addin with Inventor 2012, do the following:

• Set project StevenVolckaert.InventorPowerTools as startup project.

• In the project properties of StevenVolckaert.InventorPowerTools, set the Start action to Start external program and select the path to Inventor.exe.

  

• Finally, hit F5 to start debugging or Ctrl+F5 to run.

License

Inventor® Power Tools is licensed under the MIT license.

Installing Inventor 2012 on Windows 8.1 or Windows 10

I experienced problems running Inventor on Windows 10. After successful installation, launching Inventor stopped immediately with error code 0xc0000142:

I've found the solution to this problem in the Autodesk Community topic Autodesk Inventor 2012 does not run on Windows 10.

In a nutshell, the installation procedure on Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 is as follows:

1. Install Autodesk Inventor 2012;
2. Install Autodesk Inventor 2012 Service Pack 2;
3. Install Update 4 for Inventor 2012 SP2;
4. Install Hotfix - Inventor 2012 unexpectedly exits after updating to Windows 8.1.

See also

• Inventor® Power Tools releases