The Building Coder

RevitRubyShell for Revit 2014

Håkon Clausen of dRofus AS published an updated version of RevitRubyShell. In Håkon own words: I have updated the add-in to 2014 and added new docking and idling features. It was all completely modal in Revit 2013, which was a little inconvenient. There was some trouble with the key input focus working with modeless and idling in earlier versions, e.g., using the tab and enter keys. In Revit 2014, the new dockable panel feature in combination with idling solves that... Read more →

Exchange App Webinar and Travel Plans

Register and mark your calendar now for this upcoming webcast on making the most of the Autodesk Exchange Apps store: "How developers can ride and profit from the Autodesk Exchange Apps adoption wave" There are currently 15 Autodesk Exchange Apps stores. They represent a huge opportunity for developers to gain direct access to the growing number of Autodesk customers using Exchange Apps. In just one year they have enjoyed over one million visits and over 250,000 downloads. With comments like... Read more →

Reloading and Debugging External Commands on the Fly

After publishing the little sample code snippet yesterday showing how to load and reload an external Revit command from a byte stream to avoid locking the .NET assembly DLL, I realised that this can be combined rather nicely with my own external command lister. The combination of these two enables loading, debugging, reloading and re-debugging any simple external command on the fly, which has been a subject of regular discussion in the past. By 'simple', I mean commands that do... Read more →

Load Your Own External Command on the Fly

How to reload an external Revit command without having to restart the Revit session has been a subject of discussion many times in the past, e.g. in reloading an add-in for debug without restart, which lists four possibilities: Set up Visual Studio to efficiently load the desired project and the debugee, use the standard cycle hitting F5 to start debugging, and stop debugging when you need to make code changes. Use the RevitRubyShell or RevitPythonShell to work interactively with the... Read more →

Revit API Wishlist Survey

Once again, the time is ripe for another round of API wishlist surveys. This year's Revit API wishlist survey is now open. Please take a moment to participate and complete this survey and let us hear your feedback. It will take less than 5 minutes to complete. The Revit engineering team will use the results to understand your needs and help prioritize the areas of API enhancements in future planning, so is has a strong and immediate influence on the... Read more →

Effortless Extensible Storage

Today we proudly present an exciting and powerful extensible storage utility class library by Victor Chekalin. I'll also add some other assorted items at the end: Extensible storage extension Example 1 – save integer value to an element Example 2 – map field and sub-entity value Extensible storage extension conclusion Zoom and pan in Revit 2013 preview control Display real-time interactive element properties Extensible Storage Extension I think everyone of us has used shared parameters to save custom data in... Read more →

CouchDB Implementation and GitHub Repository

I more or less completed the research for my cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing project. I'll describe some parts of that, and also address Three aspects of life and programming Room editor navigation Nested asynchronous database call-back functions Roomedit – my first GitHub project Debugging JavaScript with Firebug Screen snapshots on mobile devices Open source components used by Autodesk Retrieve slabs above specific walls Lazy, Simple and Perfect You will like the first slide of my upcoming tech summit... Read more →

DWG Issues and Various Other Updates

One of the highlights mentioned in the overview of the Revit 2014 API is the FreeForm element API that enables modification of solid geometry imported from DWG or SAT. Several other new DWG and DXF related features include import of DXF markup, import and link of SAT and SketchUp, and access to the DWG, IFC and DGN layer, linetype, lineweight, font and pattern tables. One result of these enhancements is the possibility to access 3D coordinates in DWG import for... Read more →

External Command Lister and Adding Ribbon Commands

I have been asked a couple of times how you can integrate multiple Revit add-ins from different sources together into a single ribbon panel. This topic has also been discussed on the web, e.g. towards the end of whether to install to the add-ins tab or make new ribbon tab, and at Autodesk University, where Jose Guia presented CP3766 – Tying All of Your Revit Add-ins into a Pretty Little Ribbon. Unfortunately, none of these offer any very useful solution,... Read more →

Removing Unused Mac Architectures, Languages and Files

Nature abhors vacuum, and every disk fills up. This Mac has a 500 GB SSD, which is great, but gradually getting cramped. Looking around for some disk space management tools, I also happened to stumble across Monolingual and made immediate and effective spontaneous use of it. Mac programs come with bundled resources for multiple PC architectures and languages. Monolingual is a program for removing unnecessary resources in order to reclaim several hundred megabytes of disk space. It does exactly what... Read more →

Source Code Formatting and Google Prettifier

As you know, I format my source code to pretty short lines in order to avoid having them truncated by the narrow blog post view column. I also like to present the code colour coded, as it appears in Visual Studio and many other programmer editors, to make it more readable. For .NET code, I use CopySourceAsHtml inside of Visual Studio for that. I tried using other tools outside of Visual Studio instead in the past, including building my own,... Read more →

Add-In Wizards for Revit 2014

I updated my Visual Studio Revit add-in wizards and am taking the time to publish them today, which is Ascension Day and a holiday in Neuchâtel. That also gives me some extra time to prepare for the June 3-4 Tech Summit presentation of my cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing project. The presentation must be pre-submitted by May 20, and a full recording by May 27, so pressure is rising. I completed the implementation and still want to catch up... Read more →

Copy and Paste API Applications and Modeless Assertion

Here is a detailed description of one of the most exciting Revit 2014 API features that you should have heard about by now and promises numerous uses, prompted by a question from a developer on duplicating views from one document to another. Another couple of uses of it cropped up in the past, so it seems like an overview is called for: Duplicating a view from one document to another Solving the non-unique unique id problem Managing materials in adsklib... Read more →

A Simpler Dockable Panel Sample

Here is a very nice little sample on using the new Revit 2014 dockable panels by Håkan Wikemar of AEC, Sweden. In Håkan's words, it is close to the DockableDialogs SDK sample but easier to follow. The DockableDialogs SDK sample demonstrates modeless dialog design, external events, and the new dockable dialogs UI API framework. Håkan's DockableDialog sample described here focuses purely on the dockable panel functionality and nothing else. One thing to note is that you need to register the... Read more →

My Cloud-Based 2D Editor Implementation and Status

Continuing the research and development for my cloud-based round-trip 2D Revit model editing project, here are some issues I tackled since my last report: Updated project description and status CouchDB SVG editor implementation Home page: list all models and select one Updated Project Description I originally thought I would be implementing three cooperating components: the Revit add-in, a cloud-based data repository, and a browser-based JavaScript SVG viewer and editor client for the mobile devices. After struggles with and resolution of... Read more →

Revit 2014 SDK and Visual Debugging Tools

Two hot topics for today, especially the first: Updated Revit 2014 SDK Visual debugging tools Updated Revit 2014 SDK An updated Revit 2014 SDK is live on the ADN Open Revit developer page now: www.autodesk.com/developrevit This version includes RevitLookup and the AddInManager! Visual Debugging Tools Rudolf Honke of Mensch und Maschine acadGraph GmbH discovered a glitch in the definition of the room solids in one of the standard sample RVT project files. Rudi says: When testing VRML exporter with Revit... Read more →