The Building Coder

AU Classes on Python, UI, Server and Framework APIs

Thursday was another very full and fruitful day at AU. I gave my third and last class, the most exciting one in my eyes, on some UI and integration aspects. I was unable to attend Iffat May's class introducing Python and using it in Revit and Vasari via RevitPythonShell, but I love her material so much I am including it anyway. Adam Nagy presented a class addressing cloud and mobile development and the Revit Server API. Finally, Arnošt Löbel provided... Read more →

AU Classes on the View, MEP and Link APIs

Wednesday was my first normal and full AU day, after completing the developer conference and DevLab activities. I was able to attend two interesting classes held by Revit API developers Steven Mycynek and Arnošt Löbel, and present my own Revit MEP API one. Here they are in chronological order: CP3133 Using the Revit Schedule and View APIs by Steven Mycynek CP4108 Revit MEP Programming: All Systems Go by Jeremy Tammik CP3455 Managing Revit Links with the Revit API by Arnošt... Read more →

The Champions Roundtable at AU

Tuesday we held a DevLab at AU successfully exploring and resolving a bunch of interesting issues. I hope to get around to documenting and sharing some of them soon, before being overwhelmed by other new exciting stuff. The most pressing priority first, though: sharing the notes from the Revit API roundtable session. My first session at AU was a very pleasant, comfortable and fun one, being a roundtable providing a free-for-all exchange of questions, views and feedback between the audience... Read more →

Grand Canyon and AU Arrival

I always try to arrive early in Las Vegas to acclimatise and recover from jetlag before the conferences begin. I bring my sleeping bag and sleep in the desert. Sleeping in the cold dry winter desert under starlight, watching the sunset, the slow progress of the moon across the sky, the stars rotating over me, is the best acclimatisation I can imagine. I was blessed with some shooting stars during the last night as well. In previous years, I went... Read more →

Survey and Project Base Point

Happy Thanksgiving! I am on the road to Las Vegas now, gearing up for last-minute AU preparations. No actually, I am pretty much set to go. Other upcoming developer conferences still require some work, though. Meanwhile, here is some useful information on survey and project base points gathered by my colleague Joe Ye: Question: We need to work with the project base point and the survey point to design platforms in real-world coordinate systems and load survey data from DXF... Read more →

Building Performance Analysis and Face Tessellation

I am busy with Autodesk University and developer conference preparations. The Mac is happily chugging along. Welcome to Building Performance Analysis In spite of these busy times, Emile Kfouri and John Kennedy just launched a new blog on the topic of Building Performance Analysis that will probably be of great interest to many of us Revit API aficionados. Meanwhile, here is an API issue that raises a couple of new points: Triangulation Level of Detail Question: I am triangulating Revit... Read more →

Updater Queues Multi-Transaction Operation for Idling

I recently pointed out that certain operations require multiple transactions to complete. The dynamic model updater framework DMU, on the other hand, takes complete control over the transaction handling, making it impossible to incorporate such a multi-transaction operation. The updater framework is designed to enable an add-in to incorporate its own additional behaviour into a running transaction to react to changes in the model. The advantage is that the entire operation including the custom add-in behaviour is encapsulated in one... Read more →

Happy Bhai Dooj!

Happy Bhai Dooj to you! This greeting comes from my colleague Sandeep Kumar in Bangalore, who explains: Bhai Dooj is a festival of prayers from sister to brother, brother's protection for her sister. May we all celebrate this Bhai Dooj with even more love and protection for our sisters and brothers. Best wishes on this Bhai Dooj. Thus fortified, let us turn to a Revit API issue, based on this excerpt from a useful little chat I had yesterday that... Read more →

Roll Your Own Toggle Button

Today I took my first stab at creating, compiling and debugging a new Revit add-in on the Mac. I cannot run Revit or Visual Studio natively on the Mac, of course, so those have to remain in Windows, hosted by the Parallels environment on the Mac. I had to fiddle around quite a bit with the Parallels synchronisation, which seems to be breaking more things than it fixes, for me at least. I managed in the end in spite of... Read more →

Moving to the Mac

I have been quiet for a whole week now, busy setting up my Mac, learning new functionality, techniques, keyboard shortcuts, editors, you name it. Under Windows, I was already using quite a number of batch files and command line Unix-style tools, so I am very happy to have a real Unix shell to play with now. On the other hand, each batch file needs some fixes applied to convert it to a shell script, and every keystroke needs some additional... Read more →

Geometry Object Subcategory

I received and have started installing and learning to use my new laptop, which is a Mac, I'm finishing up my preparations for Autodesk University, and I'm working on preparations for upcoming developer conferences, so you can imagine there is rather a lot to do and 24 hours per day seem very limiting. I love the Unix shell! Goodbye, DOS box. Thank goodness my colleague Joe Ye answered a case that I found interesting and would like to share with... Read more →

Temporary Transaction Trick Touchup

I mentioned a number of uses of the temporary transaction trick a few days back. Autodesk's own Revit API transaction expert Arnošt Löbel has a very important point to add to that discussion: The procedure as described is not always going to work. First of all, you need to regenerate manually before retrieving any modified geometry; even that is not always guaranteed to give you the accurate and proper geometry. Many times you will need to actually commit the 'temporary'... Read more →

Drive Revit through a WCF Service

Today, a special titbit for you: How can I access Revit functionality from an external process? As we have underlined many times in the past, the Revit API does not support any kind of asynchronous access. The Idling event, however, provides a possibility to work around this limitation. Daren Thomas, the author or RevitPythonShell, even presented a neat and clean pattern for semi asynchronous Idling API access. Now Victor Chekalin, aka Виктор Чекалин, presents another very neat sample providing such... Read more →