The Building Coder

Update API Assembly References and Wizards

I finally completed my disk clean-up and managed to install the Autodesk Building Design Suite Ultimate 2013. Phew. Update API Assembly References That requires me to update the Revit API references in the projects I am working on accordingly. In order to easily compile all the SDK samples, I always create copies of the Revit API assemblies in the default installation locations for Revit Architecture, MEP and Structure. Here is the batch file cprvtapi.bat that I used to achieve this... Read more →

Revit 2013 Product GUIDs and GUID Algorithm

Every year anew, people ask for the Revit product GUIDs used to identify the Revit installation and stored in the Windows registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall There are different keys for each of the three Revit flavours, plus the Revit 2013 one-box solution, and for 32 and 64 bit operating systems. We discussed this topic in the past for Revit 2010 and previous versions, Revit 2011 and Revit 2012, when the 'perpetual GUID algorithm' was introduced. The install path is much less... Read more →

Determine Revit Demo Mode

Here is yet another interesting example of an apparent gap in the Revit API that can be easily filled using a little workaround. We have seen numerous examples of performing a certain operation within a temporary transaction that is then rolled back to cancel it, such as to determine gross material quantities for an element with openings, a host reference and, more generally, all object relationships. Here is an example of using a related but different approach: the trick consists... Read more →

Mixed Mode C++ in Revit 2012

Here is a short note to start the week, on an issue that arose a couple of times using mixed mode C++ development in Revit 2012. This information was originally published on the members-only ADN web site as a technical solution on the development environment for mixed mode C++ for Revit 2012: Question: I have a mixed mode C++ application. When I run it on a machine where no version of Visual Studio was ever installed, I see the following... Read more →

Preparing for a Hands-on Revit API Training

Question: I have registered for a hands-on Revit API Training, but I have little experience in programming, and almost none in .NET or C#. How can I prepare for it to make best use of this opportunity? Answer: This is actually all described in the discussion on getting started with the Revit 2012 API. Still, let's highlight some of the points and put them in proper order for you. The first of the following items is of interest for anyone... Read more →

Revit Add-in File Load Exception

Back from my vacation in Andalusia, and now moving full speed ahead towards Autodesk University, my lecture and hands-on lab on the Revit extensible storage API and all the other exciting goodies there. Meanwhile, here is one little issue that immediately arose with the Revit String Search utility published last week: Probably the most common problem that people keep running into with add-ins on Windows Vista, both in Revit and other environments, is the need to unblock the zip file.... Read more →

Product and Add-In Wizard Updates

Here are several interesting updates and other little news items that appeared recently. Revit 2012 update release 2 Visual Studio Revit add-in wizard update Removing an Add-In Registered by the Wizard Global Leadership Summit at the One Team Conference Revit 2012 Update Release 2 A few days ago, I was very surprised to hear that some people neglect to update their Revit products when intermediate updates appear. I find that incomprehensible. I updated all three flavours myself yesterday with zero... Read more →

Getting Started with the Revit 2012 API

We already published 'Getting Started with the Revit API' guides for Revit 2009 and 2010. Here is a completely revamped and much expanded version for Revit 2012. Actually, before even reading any further on this page, go to the Revit Developer Center and see what material is available there. That is always the most up-to-date place to look. Still, this overview may help your orientation as well: Getting Started with the Revit 2012 API 1. Setting up the Environment The... Read more →

Visual Studio, C# and VB Express

Yesterday Kean mentioned that debugging AutoCAD.NET projects using the Visual C# and VB Express editions is now directly supported by the latest version of the AutoCAD .NET Wizard. That prompted me to have a look and see what the current situation is with Revit add-ins. Obviously, we poor Revit developers do not have such a sophisticated wizard available ... or so I thought! I installed Visual C# Express and started my experiment: I launched the new installation and selected New... Read more →

VendorId, DevTV, and My First Plugin

Here is a simple issue from a discussion with Stephen LeCompte of FKP Architects, Inc. that several other people people also recently ran into: Question: I followed the steps provided in 'DevTV: Introduction to Revit 2011 Programming - Part I' and incorporated them in my Revit Architecture 2012 64-bit version, but there is a problem. When I start up Revit 2012 it displays the following error message saying 'Failed to initialize the add-in "RevitNETAddin3.addin" because the add-in registration is missing... Read more →

Product GUIDs for Revit 2012 and Forever More

Every year anew, people ask for the Revit product GUIDs used to identify the Revit installation and stored in the Windows registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall There are different keys for each of the three Revit flavours, and for both 32 and 64 bit operating systems. The first time around, we discussed the Revit 2010 and previous versions' installation path and product GUIDs, and then updated the list for Revit 2011 last year. As I mentioned last time, the install path is... Read more →

Visual Studio Add-In Wizards for Revit 2012

As I mentioned yesterday, this weekend was spent traveling to Verona to give a Revit API training here. Happily, I enjoyed some mountain air the weekend before, on Helgenhorn 2837m, Basodino 3273m and Cima di Lago south of All'Acqua in the Bedretto Valley (more photos by Jogi): Anyway, that was last weekend; back to here and now in Verona, where I was busy yesterday, preparing for the training, starting today. I already updated the DevTV Visual Studio wizards for creating... Read more →

Performant Hardware

I spent all day yesterday in trains, which was unfortunate, since it was the most beautiful Sunday, and springtime is in full bloom. It also forced upon me some unfortunate comparisons of the Swiss and Italian train systems. Needless to say, I arrived later than expected. Still, I ended up happily back in Verona, Italy, where I started seriously learning Italian two years ago, for a repeat visit to provide a Revit API training class to Steel & Graphics srl.... Read more →

Reducing Revit Debug Verbosity

Many people have complained about the amount of noise caused by the ribbon in the Visual Studio debug output window. Kean Walmsley just pointed out that you can easily make AutoCAD less noisy when debugging by adding a couple of lines to the acad.exe.config file, which lives in the same folder as the acad.exe you are debugging, such as C:\Program Files\Autodesk\AutoCAD 2011, to ask the WPF binding trace provider to lower the volume. Since Revit uses the same internal ribbon... Read more →

External Application Attributes

Arnošt Löbel added a comment on the little zero document external application that I presented last week, pointing out that the transaction attribute (e.g. TransactionMode.Manual) is only applicable to external commands, not applications. As he says, it should be treated as an add-in declaration error, but since it is harmless, it is quietly ignored. (It could be treated as an error in the future though.) The question is also how the regeneration attribute is handled. It was originally intended for... Read more →

Enable Ribbon Items in Zero Document State

Several people have asked about how to activate their custom add-in panel items when Revit is in zero document state, i.e. when no document has been opened in the Revit user interface: For an external command, it is no big deal: if you set both its transaction mode and regeneration option to Manual, it will appear in the Revit ribbon panel under Add-Ins > External > External Tools and also be available in zero document state: However, as you can... Read more →

84 Second Product Support Overview

As you know, I work in the AEC workgroup of the ADN or Autodesk Developer Network DevTech organisation, providing support to developers making use of Autodesk products and their application programming interfaces (APIs). ADN is part of the Autodesk support organisation. Another, much larger part of the support organisation is the product support team, which resolves end user issues. For a really quick overview of the E-Services provided by Autodesk Product Support, you can have a look at this new... Read more →

Snow and Woe with Manifest Files

I am still on the road toward Paris. The departure of our flight in Moscow was delayed, so we missed the connection to Paris in Vienna. In addition, I heard that the Paris airport was closed all day until five in the afternoon due to snow. We are still booked to fly and arrive Thursday night, though, so the Paris conference scheduled for Friday is not yet endangered. Right now, the ETA is quarter to twelve, so it will be... Read more →

Read DWG Settings and Content Location from INI File

Autumn is here in full now, grey and wet outside. The beautiful yellow leaves are turning brown and soggy. We had a wonderful sunny weekend, though, and I lay on the grass in the sunshine watching the distant mountains yesterday... In a completely different vein, today is the final day for submitting the Autodesk University material! I'm still not completely done... Meanwhile, here are two quick cases handled by Joe Ye quite a while back which both ended up resorting... Read more →

MeasurePanelArea Update

Iffat Mai of Perkins + Will brought up an issue with the MeasurePanelArea Revit SDK sample, handled by Joe Ye: Question: As we reviewed the Massing > MeasurePanelArea SDK Sample, the following error message was displayed while trying to run it: It says: "Input type is of an element type that exists in the API, but not in Revit's native object model. Try using Autodesk.Revit.DB.FamilyInstance instead, and then post-processing the results to find the elements of interest." Answer: This is... Read more →

C++ Revit Add-In

To my great surprise, I recently discovered that I have never yet published anything at all on implementing a Revit add-in in C++. That is way overdue, so here goes, a step by step description of setting up a C++ project to implement a Revit 2011 external command add-in. It is very similar to setting up a C# or VB Revit add-in project, similar to the steps described for a C# or VB Revit add-in for Revit 2009 way back... Read more →

Revit AppStore

I have been in Cairo, Egypt, now, for the past couple days, giving a Revit API training course at Kemet Corporation and practicing my meagre vocabulary of a handful of Arabian words. I do love learning languages! I also visit the mosque twice a day in the breaks. I learned from my participants that the word is a complete misnomer, and it should really be called مسجد (masjid). There, my first blogged word in Arabic, and my first attempt at... Read more →

Subscription Release and Updated SDK

Lots of really important news coming in right now, both because the mid-year updates of the Revit family products are now available and because we just released the Revit 2011 DevTV recordings that we are so excited about. Similar to last year, Autodesk provides two types of mid-year updates to Revit: The Web Update 2 (WU2) that I recently discussed. The Subscription Release. Unlike the public web updates, the Revit 2011 subscription releases are available only for subscription customers. Updated... Read more →

Revit 2011 DevTV

The Revit DevTV recordings are probably the absolutely most efficient learning resource for quickly getting a hands-on experience of programming Revit. They include Overview of the SDK Installation of samples Creating your first add-in Iterating over database elements Selecting an element Extracting element parameter data ... And much more! The first version was created for Revit 2008, and that was reused for the Revit 2009 training material as well. Augusto Gonçalves of Autodesk Brazil created an updated version for Revit... Read more →

DoorSwing Fix

I am spending this week in the UK. We are having a long-awaited EMEA DevTech team meeting today. We finally succeeded in creating a possibility for all ADN engineers working in the European region to get together face to face. I met some of my colleagues for the first time, for instance Marat, who is based in Moscow, and Kristine from Toronto (not really part of Europe). The rest of the week I will be attending an internal training course,... Read more →

Network Access to Add-In Manifest and Icons

We already discussed quite a few aspects of the add-in manifest files, including: A simple example of creating one for my first Revit 2011 plug-in, the pipe to conduit converter. The RevitAddInUtility which can be used to read and write add-in manifest files. My Guidize utility which can populate the add-in manifest ClientId GUID. A Guidize update which also handles the AddInId tag. The visibility mode which controls which in which Revit editor contexts an external command add-in appears. How... Read more →

Edit Wall Length

I recently posted Augusto Gonçalves DevTV add-in templates, which by the way have been updated based on some recent feedback. Here are the updated versions and the directories to plug them in to: TemplateRevitArchAddinCS.zip: [My Documents]\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C# TemplateRevitArchAddinVB.zip: [My Documents]\Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual Basic Augusto has already done quite a bit of other work on the Revit API as well, such as preparing the DevTV presentation for the Revit 2010 API. He will be giving his first Revit API... Read more →

Debugging in Visual Studio 2010 Express

Yesterday was the first day of the Revit API training in Munich. As usual, I was able to learn something new. Frank Neuberg of MAX BÖGL assembled and tested the following summary of information sources related to using Visual Studio 2010 and its Express version for creating and debugging a Revit add-in. I've summarized some information sources to set up an integrated debugging process for class library projects together with Revit.exe (2011) in C# Visual Studio 2010 Express Edition: Currently... Read more →

DevTV Add-In Templates

Here are the add-in templates prepared by my colleague Augusto Gonçalves of Autodesk Brazil for the upcoming DevTV presentations. I really love both the implementation and the description, both are so short and sweet and yet complete! They save you a lot of typing and clicking when setting up a new add-in, and especially help avoid all the potential errors that insist on creeping in when you set things up manually. Support is provided for both external commands and external... Read more →

ClientId Versus AddInId

Looking at many other developers' add-in manifest files here at the AEC DevLab in Waltham, I just noticed that the ClientId tag that I have been using in my manifest files has actually been renamed to AddInId to be more consistent. Most other developers are using the AddInId tag instead of the ClientId one. The ClientId tag still works, but maybe I should start using AddInId myself as well in future. I updated my guidize utility to populate and update... Read more →

Add-In Applications for Multiple Revit Products

We recently discussed the add-in visibility mode, which only applies to external commands. The Revit API does not provide a similar built-in facility to control the loading and availability of an external application. This turned out to be an issue for Dave Echols of Hankins and Anderson, Inc., who very friendlily is sharing his solution to this lack with us here: Managing Custom Applications for Multiple Revit Products As a follow-up on and complement to the Add-In Visibility Mode posting,... Read more →

Add-In Visibility Mode

This Monday is the Pentecost holiday in Neuchâtel. I used it to make my first experiments using the add-in manifest visibility mode tag. The developer guide has the following to say about it: Provides the ability to specify if the command is visible in project documents, family documents, or no document at all. Also provides the ability to specify the discipline(s) where the command should be visible. Multiple values may be set for this option. Optional; use this tag for... Read more →

RevitAddInUtility for 32 and 64 Bit Systems

We already discussed the RevitAddInUtility, a stand-alone .NET assembly providing its own API for manipulating add-in manifest files and determining Revit installation information. People are starting to make serious use of it now, which led to the following question that popped up several times in the last couple of days, among others in this comment by Joel, saying: Question: I am trying to create a single installer for both 32 bit and 64 bit but it seems that RevitAddInUtility.dll is... Read more →