The Building Coder

Pernickety Blogging

Some important, some less important and some absolutely pernickety recommendations on perfecting API-related blog posts... Read more →

Bounding Boxes Axis Alignment and Transformation

Aspects of axis-aligned bounding boxes, SVG paths and AI news – BoundingBox is axis-aligned – BoundingBox transformation – Interactive explanation of SVG path – Claude.AI – Relativising the impact of AI... Read more →

Logging and Monitoring Deleted Data

Useful insights on logging and monitoring – Monitoring with SLOG – Monitoring deleted elements – How to Favicon – Decentralised autonomous organisations – Palindrome and ambigram... Read more →

Face Intersect Face is Unbounded

My work on setting up a new PC is nearing completion. There is also a need to clarify the use of the Face.Intersect(Face) method – The unbounded Face.Intersect method – Making use of the unbounded face intersection – Rectangular face intersection ideas – Copy as HTML update – Visual Studio Revit add-in wizard update... Read more →

Close Doc and Zero Doc RvtSamples

Still getting up to speed with Revit 2020 and my new virtual machine that I set up for it... First, however, an interesting adaptation of RvtSamples to run in zero document state – RvtSamples adapted for zero document state – Migrating The Building Coder samples to Revit 2020 – Installing PowerTools Copy HTML Markup – Using PostCommand to close document... Read more →

DevCon Europe and Typepad versus Google Search

I am making final travel preparations for the Forge accelerator in Rome next week, and need to start preparing for DevCon Europe as well. As always, when you have no time to spare, something else urgent cropped up as well requiring immediate attention – Forge DevCon Europe coming – Hijacking Typepad search input for Google site search... Read more →

tbc – The Building Coder Source and Index on GitHub

Developers frequently lament bad search functionality on Typepad-hosted blogs. Furthermore, it is always handy to have an offline local copy of any kind of important documentation you need to consult regularly. With a local copy of The Building Coder source text, you can use your standard system tools to search and index locally in any form you like. Finally, wouldn't it be nice to have a simple line-by-line index of all The Building Coder blog posts ever published? – Publishing The Building Coder source and index on GitHub – GitHub size limitations – Alternative blogging platforms – Fork and clone to create your own local installation – El Perro Semihundido by Goya... Read more →

The Responsive Building Coder

I suffer from acute and chronic responsiveness. That is unpleasant for me, although hopefully pleasing and useful for the rest of humanity. What I mean is, I tend to answer other people's questions and needs before taking care of my own. I am forever trying to stop doing that. One of these days, I certainly will. The topic I refer to above is not me, personally, though, but The Building Coder blog. Nowadays, web pages should be based on a... Read more →

Autodesk View and Data API Notes and Samples

Here is a summary of my notes from three presentations on the Autodesk View and Data API given by Cyrille Fauvel and Philippe Leefsma, in the two introductory workshops at HackZurich on Friday evening, October 10 and at HackaBxl in Brussels on October 17. Philippe also presented a very nice and absolutely minimal basic viewer sample in node.js demonstrating how to implement a private web service to obtain the authorisation token without exposing your key and secret in your JavaScript... Read more →

PoiPointer, View Depth Override and Destination BIM

Three topics for today: Brussels hackathon and PoiPointer View depth override Destination BIM contest Brussels Hackathon and PoiPointer I returned from the Hackathon Open Data Brussels that I mentioned last Friday, promoting the use of the huge amounts of open data, cf. this impressive list of available data sets. As said, I participated in the PoiPointer project, with a goal of implementing an app pointing out points of interest of various categories in Brussels, e.g. museums, cultural places, monuments, sculptures,... Read more →

Room Editor with Handlebars and Refresh

Somehow, I have a much harder time documenting my JavaScript exploits than my Revit API ones. The Autodesk Tech Summit is taking place in Toronto next week, and I am making those potentially disastrous last minute changes that every sane person avoids at all costs. Automatically Refresh on Save One really important thing that I fixed now required just one single line of code: The browser display of the model is automatically refreshed when you press 'Save'. I remember wondering... Read more →

HTML5 for Teaching Maths and Physics

Good morning and welcome to this new week. I am pretty busy right now, so I will just recommend taking a look at something not related to the Revit API: Mathigon, a stupendously beautiful interactive didactical mathematical eBook making advanced mathematical ideas accessible to the general public. Mathematics has never been so colourful! Very impressive use of HTML5, JavaScript, etc. It reminds me of the JavaScript physics sample simulating ripping a curtain of tearable cloth that I mentioned last spring,... Read more →

Python Mac Pasteboard Access

I recently discussed the Google prettify tool that I started using to display colour-coded JavaScript source code in HTML. As I mentioned there, it does a good job for all languages I looked at except C# and VB .NET, where I prefer the colour coding generated by Visual Studio, since that highlights class names defined in referenced .NET assemblies as well as the built-in .NET ones. To retrieve the Visual Studio colour coding and insert it into my HTML page,... 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 →

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 →