The Building Coder

Sci-Fi, Languages and Pipe Insulation Retrieval

Three quick notes on critical and inspiring sci-fi, programming languages and MEP filtering – Pipe insulation retrieval performance – Programming languages to learn – Agency by William Gibson... Read more →

Tailor Your BIM with F#, Forge, IFC and Takeoffs

I have a whole bunch of exciting overdue topics lined up. Let's start with these – Tailor Your BIM sums room areas with F# – Control view for design option elements with F# – Copy legend view and component from background file – Forge RVT to IFC translation defaults to 2x3 – Latitude and longitude in Revit IFC export – Takeoff creation requires branch duct... Read more →

F# Procedural Modelling and Z3 Constraint Solving

F# Mantis Procedural Modelling and Z3 Constraint Solving: Matthew Moloney presents the potential of interactive F# coding in Revit, like the Tsunami Rhino plugin, with a number of improvements, similar to the Revit Python Shell but for the F# programming language, bringing advantages including full code completion, error checking, performance, design scalability and access to powerful procedural modelling and constraint solving tools... Read more →

DivideParts in F# and Line Styles

My internet connection died last night. After worrying and testing quite a bit last night and this morning, I laid a temporary cable from my neighbour's router. Shortly after I finished, my own connection came back up again, after about 14 hours downtime. Murphy's law remains valid, as always. Very reassuring :-) There is lots of building work going on nearby, so probably they broke it and fixed it with no explanations given. Anyway, I am back to normal now... Read more →

AU Virtual free for ADN Members

Kean Walmsley just announced that a free Premier Pass to Autodesk University virtual is available for members of the Autodesk Developer Network. Please join us there. We are presenting at both AUv and the non-virtual AU: Kean's F# sessions. AutoCAD-related AU and AUv sessions. The Revit Family and MEP APIs. I am looking forward to seeing or hearing from you in the next couple of days! Read more →

Use F# Directly in Revit

Still struggling to load a native F# module directly as a Revit add-in? Ralf Huvendiek had a quick look at this issue and created all three different flavours of external commands implemented in F# that can be called directly as external Revit tools: Defined in a namespace. Defined in a module. Defined in a module within a namespace. The problem I had when calling F# via C# is caused by the line specifying 'module BuildingCoder', which generates the strange class... Read more →

Hello F# via C#

Still in Barcelona, after a very interesting day spent with Alex Vila Ortega, who gave us on a tour of the Sagrada Familia cathedral by the famous Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi to discuss the interesting mathematical and geometrical aspects of his architecture, and what we can do together to implement some effective support for them in Revit. I plan to write more on that as soon as possible, but I have something more urgent to discuss first. Kean's F# programming... Read more →

F# Programming Contest

Kean Walmsley just announced a programming contest using the exciting new functional .NET language F#. Since functional programming has many uses in all realms including architecture, there should be lots of scope for making use of it in conjunction with the Revit API as well. I hope to install Visual Studio 2008 real soon now and have a look at setting up a basic F# Revit add-in project. I am very much looking forward to hearing from you about ideas... Read more →