Migrating to 2006

On one CAD mailing list that I belong to, I received the following report from my good friend, Janet, relaying the ups and downs of trying to pull off a migration, and she has kindly granted me permission to share her experiences with you here.

You may wish to read my tussle in AUGI over 2006 CUI's. It is long and windy though.

First off, I've learned to NOT migrate tools the first time acad opens. You may lose a lot of the 2006 functionality in favour of old code. Everyone I know who does this ends up uninstalling & re-installing Acad 2006.

Familiarize yourself with your existing setvar settings, and new 2006 setvars you may want to save in your templates. Also, take a close look at your old office menus BEFORE deciding which way to go. Then set up a user profile and a separate admin profile through options. Make sure both profiles have all the right folders in the searchpath in the right order. Exporting them to an .arg for safekeeping is also a good idea. Look for lsps that are calling up discontinued setvars. You may have same named, but different, acad.lsp, acad2000,lsp, acaddoc.lsp, loading up in wrong order. Pay attention to the ACAD history window. When you load vanilla 2006, it will load in certain order, no errors.

Then do your work under the admin profile. Find all the old office mnus and convert them to cuis using the CUI command. Make a note if several submenus are loaded as partials into a chief one. You would add the subs to the chief by using the CUI command as well. Next you will have to decide which cui to designate as main. Robert Bell recommends the Custom.cui that comes with the software. It has ACAD and EXPRESS already pre-loaded as partials I believe. (***With notepad or the cui editor, you have the choice of removing them as partials. You could even load them as partials under the office.cui, so many choices! It really depend on how you want to support it and the state of the original office menus!) You have the option to designate an enterprise menu, and in a perfect world that would be the office.cui, UNLESS it is really a beefed up and renamed ACAD menu. In that case you will have trouble making it enterprise, because when you are ready to test it with the user profile as current, you will notice that whatever you chose as enterprise is now appearing as the main menu and there is no enterprise. This is correct and by design, because this menu is now read-only to the users. You will also not be able to modify the cui at this point, because it is named as enterprise in the admin profile. You would have to deselect it from the profile in order to make any changes to the office.cui itself.

Keep testing with the user profile as current and work through the loading errors you may get, one at a time.

MY OWN SOLUTION In the end I opted to give up on my office cui. It had old acad in it and was too F--ed up. I made a new cui called office2006.cui. Then I used the transfer tab to drag and drop everything I needed from office.cui I had just made, leaving all the old acad behind. Then I transferred everything from the provided acad.cui and acetmain.cui. Don't forget to look all the way through the entire tree, opening lsp, menus, shortcuts, legacy. etc. If you get a lot of ? in your buttons, try renaming or getting rid of the mnrs.

Now make a workspace and drag everything you want into that. Don't forget to drag over the toolbar called workspace. Use the command WORKSPACE to set it to this preference.

This is a big subject to wrap your head around. Good luck making sense of it, I hope this helps. It has taken me TWO WHOLE WEEKS to figure this out. For a contractor, they sure are paying me well to self-train. I'm not complaining, but it was TOUGH SLEDDING.
Now I think I'll write a book about it and get rich quick.
Goodnight.
Janet of the great white north