This is very interesting news,the majority of staff and students work with Microstation for their designs etc. before bringing them to me for laser cutting and so on - so to add support in QCAD for the .dgn format could prove to be quite useful.

How long would something like this take to implement?

I need to look at the new OpenDesign library version first. In the best case, DGN import is identical to DWG import, in the worst, it requires some data conversion for entity data, layer data, etc. All I've seen so far is a press release.

Thanks - It will interesting to see how things pan out with this.

I've managed to import my first DGN file into QCAD 3.

Clive: do you happen to have any real-life DGN files I could use for testing? They are much harder to come by than DWG/DXF files... Thanks!

See attached - a couple of .dgn files and a couple of snap shots of what they should look like.
Hope this helps.

.dgn file -Drawing 1 test

hmmm -its not letting me upload the .dgn files here, I`ll try and send them via a pm on the forum.

lets try a zipped file instead!

Thats got it ;) - I think the extension .dgn is the problem here.

Same samples but hopefully unprotected, so you test for editing etc...

Thanks. The import is not perfect, but I didn't expect that either. It looks good enough to be included in the next QCAD 3.x release.

Not bad at all, please put me on the list for the next release testing.

Talking about releases - please take a look at the latest post here regarding CamExpert:
http://www.ribbonsoft.com/rsforum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2078

DGN import has been disabled for now since it crashes with the new Teigha 3.8.2 release.