XREF a DGN

Using AutoCAD Civil '09 and Microstation V8 XM

I'm trying to XREF and drawing that was created in Microstation (we'll call it Base.DGN) into AutoCAD drawings (we'll call it Sheet.DWG) and it's just not working.

Typically we'll just convert the DGN to a DWG and then Xref that, but our engineer using Microstation is still going to be making modifications to Base.dgn and I'd like to be able to see his changes while I am working in sheet.dwg without having to waste a lot of time doing the conversions every few minutes.

While AutoCAD says it can use a DGN as an Xref, it's crashing every time I try to add the reference. I'm telling it to reference Base.dgn as an overlay and it will start the process, or at least it looks like it based on the command line, but it will freeze up for a minute and then AutoCAD will just close/crash.

Does anyone have any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Is that a 2D DGN or 3D DGN? If it's a 3D DGN, then that's your problem. AutoCAD doesn't 100% support DGN file. Only 2D.

I've never try this, but: try to ask your engineer to create a 2D DGN and insert the 3D DGN as reference to the file. May be you can XREF that 2D DGN to your AutoCAD file.