Getting Started

To follow along with this tutorial you will need to have Alibre Design (or Alibre Design Xpress) installed and running on your machine. You will also need to have a Microsoft Visual Studio product such as Visual Basic Express, which is available from Microsoft free of charge, at least for a limited time.

If you don't already have these tools, pick up one of the Visual Studio Express book/CD bundles listed below and download Alibre Design Xpress from Alibre. Or, for more functionality, you can buy the full versions here:

The application we'll create in this tutorial will list all of the open Alibre Design sessions (parts, assemblies, drawings) and their configurations either to a text file or to the screen, optionally including counts of those sessions and configurations.

For more detailed instruction on Visual Basic in general, here are some excellent book and references to get you started. I highly recommend the book/CD bundles, because they often contain searchable text, example code and additional features.