Accelerator, AppStore, Disqus and AEC DevBlog Articles

Lots of things happening, making it challenging to find time for my Milano trip preparations:

• Accelerator in Prague
• One million AppStore downloads
• Responsive blogs now use Disqus comments
• Great series of AEC DevBlog articles:
• PipeScheduleType is missing for a RTE file
• Reading ASHRAE Table information from elements
• Reading Loss Methods available on Revit MEP
• Creating dimensioning between two detail components
• Placing a FamilyInstance on a wall face
• How to create a coloured detail line in family?
• How to create revision cloud?
• NewExtrusion throws ArgumentException: One of the conditions for the inputs was not satisfied

Cloud Accelerator Extension in Prague

I recently mentioned the upcoming EMEA Autodesk Cloud Accelerator Extension in Prague, and Kean Walmsley also brought it up his article on the next Cloud Accelerator in Prague.

This European event is inspired by the success of the first two cloud accelerator classes held in San Francisco.

It is a one-week intensive program held at the Autodesk offices in the beautiful Czech city of Prague, the city of many bridges, September 13-18, 2015.

Here is a snapshot of my friends Roi and Blanc admiring the view of some of Prague's bridges from the Hanavsky Pavilion during their world tour in 2007:

They were also fascinated by the David Černý's urinating statues Proudy:

The accelerator provides a great opportunity to kick-start your own chosen project development making use of any Autodesk cloud technologies and PaaS infrastructure – View and Data, Autodesk BIM 360, AutoCAD I/O, Autodesk InfraWorks 360 or Autodesk ReCap – with face-to-face advice and support from Autodesk. Members of the ADN and engineering teams – me included – will be on hand to help work through any development issues you hit while creating or honing your application.

To learn more about the benefits of this program, listen to the videos documenting first-hand reports from previous participants.

So come join us in Prague for a fun week of cloud-oriented development. All you need to do is submit your application proposal by July 14: if you are selected to be one of the 10 participating companies, Autodesk will cover accommodation costs for up to 2 attendees.

Find out more at autodeskcloudaccelerator.com/prague.

Good luck with your application!

One Million Autodesk Exchange AppStore Downloads

I recently mentioned the impressive success of the Revit AppStore.

Autodesk now announced that the Exchange Apps Store downloads passed the one million mark.

Take a look at this quick two-minute YouTube DevTV video for more background info and two typical app mini-demo snippets:

Responsive Blogs now use Disqus Comments

After creating The Responsive Building Coder, I also went on to implement The Responsive 3D Web Coder, so that both blogs are now based on a responsive web design.

After that, I went on to convert both of their old Typepad commenting systems to use the more modern and centralised Disqus discussion platform.

So don't be surprised if things look a bit different now.

I hope this is an improvement   :-)

Please let me know what you think.

Great Series of AEC DevBlog Articles

Lately, I have not been following the AEC DevBlog as closely as I would like.

Now I discovered that my colleagues Aaron Lu and Augusto Goncalves have put together an impressive series of posts based on recent ADN cases that you should definitely not miss, three especially exciting RME-specific ones, and some more generic:

• PipeScheduleType is missing for a RTE file – on creating a new PipeScheduleType in a corrupted document by manually creating a new pipe and extracting its newly generated pipe schedule type from the built-in RBS_PIPE_CLASS_PARAM parameter value, which can then be applied to other pipe segments by adding a new RoutingPreferenceRule to the RoutingPreferenceManager.
• Reading ASHRAE Table information from elements – how to read the ASHRAE table information from an MEP project via the getTableNameByServerId, which is not part of the Revit API and must be retrieved from the MEPCalculationServerInfo instead.
• Reading Loss Methods available on Revit MEP – how to use the getLossMethods function provided by a Revit MEP external server to retrieve a list of names and GUIDs of all available loss method implementations.
• Creating dimensioning between two detail components – using NewDimension to create dimensioning between specific detail component instance geometry sub-elements.
• Placing a FamilyInstance on a wall face – on exploring which overload of the NewFamilyInstance method to use, and tweaking the result using HostObjectUtils.GetSideFaces and the built-in parameter BuiltInParameter.INSTANCE_SCHEDULE_ONLY_LEVEL_PARAM.
• How to create a coloured detail line in family? – using the NewSubcategory method to define a specific colour for a detail curve created via NewDetailCurve.
• How to create revision cloud? – an example of using the static RevisionCloud.Create method.
• NewExtrusion throws ArgumentException: One of the conditions for the inputs was not satisfied – debugging and solving a problem with the SketchPlane provided to the NewExtrusion method.

Many thanks to Aaron and Augusto for all their research and documentation!