The Building Coder

Hackzurich, Fluelisee, Memento, Jobs and Books

Cool topics for today: Zurich hackathon projects and winner: Immersive Solitude and relaxation at the Flueseeli Lake Project Memento and a webinar More job opportunities My favourite books Zurich Hackathon Projects and Winner: Immersive The Zurich hackathon completed with 101 new projects submitted. The winner, both overall and of the Autodesk 'best 3D app' challenge, is Immersive (GitHub repository). Congratulations! It uses regular smartphones and inexpensive devices like Google Cardboard to create an immersive stereoscopic virtual reality impression. Scenes are... Read more →

Architecture Mismatch Warning Disabler Update

The default Visual Studio settings will generate a processor architecture mismatch warning when compiling a Revit 2014 or 2015 add-in. Last year, I implemented a utility named DisableMismatchWarning.exe to recursively disable this warning in all projects in all subfolders of the current directory. Now I just happened to receive a new sample add-in project from a developer for testing that was not recognised by this utility, so I implemented an update for it. Before getting to that, let me share... Read more →

Back from Sweden

I returned from my wonderful relaxing outdoor vacation in the vast nature of Sweden and had numerous simple Revit API questions waiting for me on my return, e.g. Annotation Location property Placing ElementType instances Commercial use of the Revit API Before looking at those, here is an impression of the huge open space offered by heaven and earth in the islands in the Stockholm Skärgården archipelago, e.g. Utö and Ålö: For something more tranquil, here is a sunset meditation on... Read more →

New York Travel Preparation and ADN Job Opening

Friday – travel to New York to spend the weekend at the AEC Symposium and Hackathon. Before leaving, I revelled briefly in nature, celebrating a couple of hours of moderate weather after the cold and wet spell lately, before spending the entire following weekend indoors staring at computer screens in Big Apple: I celebrated the full moon on Wednesday evening with a nice fire on a nearby hill with a grand view: I arrived safely in New York and just... Read more →

Compiling the Revit 2015 SDK and Migrating Bc Samples

As I announced yesterday, Revit 2015 was released last week, the Revit SDK was posted and updated, RevitLookup for Revit 2015 is available on GitHub, the DevDays Online presentation on the new API functionality is available, and I migrated The Building Coder samples to Revit 2015. After doing so, I went out and spent a few hours on a hill enjoying the full moon – enjoying nature, some time, some space for myself – ca. 380.000 km of space in... Read more →

Back from Desert and Two Happy Events

I returned from my hike near Zagora in the Sahara desert in Morocco. I was welco... Read more →

Creating an Offset Wall Solution

Happy St. Valentine's Day! As we all know and have known for a long time from the exploration of the wall compound layers, the Revit API wall location line is at the centre of the wall. There is no way to change that, and it is important to note that the API location line is completely separate from the one whose location can be controlled through the user interface, and also through the built-in parameter WALL_KEY_REF_PARAM, but only after the... Read more →

Lots of Clouds

Let me recapitulate my cloud related explorations for my simplified 2D BIM editor, since I will be discussing it again at a web-based BIM workshop later this week. Before getting to that, though, talking about cloud related topics reminds me of some others of completely different nature that are near and dear to me: Clouds in La Palma Cloud Atlas Cloud-based simplified BIM editor Autodesk cloud service overview Updated RevitLookup on GitHub Above, in and under the Clouds of la... Read more →

Happy New Year!

Welcome back after the break and Happy New Year! I have already been busily answering cases for the past few days. Here are two of the topics that came up: Access to model arc centre point reference API-generated schedules on sheets lack title Before getting to those, let me present a photo and an interesting syntactic challenge from my non-technical activities in the past ten days. I spent some time after Christmas in the hills in Toggenburg, and we had... Read more →

Triggering Immediate External Event Execution

We held our first West European Devday in Paris on Monday and I am now sitting in the airport headed for Milano. En route to Milano, I worked at testing Joe Ye's trick to trigger the Idling event (potential SetRaiseWithoutDelay workaround) to force an immediate execution of my external event. I also added a comment from Guy Robinson on Revit requiring focus that had me worried for a moment. However, the solution is easy! Before we get to that, here... Read more →

A Pee Cee Free Day

I celebrated my birthday with a PC-free day. My colleague Joe Ye sent me a nice (digital) cake from Beijing: Joe points out that the character on the cake means longevity or birthday, and peach is the traditional food for birthdays. Thank you, Joe! I completely avoided starting up the computer, not even to listen to music or fiddle with photos. I shot a couple, though, on a nice long autumn walk: Larger... Larger still... What a huge beautiful world... Read more →

Back and Preparing for AU and DevDays Conferences

I returned from my nine-day break and am fully invigorated and happily back with the Revit API. Besides handling questions from developers, I also need to deal with the upcoming yearly conference preparations. On one hand, we have Autodesk University, for which registration opened and I need to prepare my three classes. As you know, AU is completely open and public, based on the released Autodesk products, and addresses both end users and developers. The Autodesk Developer Network ADN, supporting... Read more →

Football and Space Adjacency for Heat Load Calculation

Here is a summary of a discussion with Jasper Desmet, who is studying engineering and working on a research project for his master thesis concerning heat load calculation using BIM software, proving that it is possible for a novice programmer to extract the required information from the model using the Revit API. Football Tournament, Fleece and Shard First, though, let me mention that I visited the UK this weekend to participate in the Autodesk European soccer tournament, which took place... Read more →

Parameter DisplayUnitType, Bretagne and Decompilers

After looking at several performance enhancement possibilities last week, e.g. the sweep family performance enhancement and LoadFamily and collector iteration performance, here is another exciting and pretty sophisticated exploration of internal Revit API implementation details by Victor Chekalin that can be used to achieve a significant speed improvement when accessing large numbers of parameters and checking their DisplayUnitType property. Brittany Before getting to that, though, here is an update on my current whereabouts. Yesterday I spent travelling to Brest and... Read more →

Export Wall Parts Individually to DXF

I am back from my vacation. It was a wonderful break, and I feel ready and happy to get back to grips with everyday life and work again. A query from a colleague caught up with me already on the way back, on exporting a whole bunch of selected wall panel parts to individual DXF files. That gave me something nice and interesting to fiddle with during the nightly train ride up from Napoli to Milano and led to the... Read more →

Implement a Progress Bar and Abort a Lengthy Process

The time has come to talk of many things: of shoes and ships, and sealing-wax, of cabbages and kings [^]... or no, let's continue sticking to the Revit API for now, more or less; today's topics are: A walk in the snow and a crystal covered baby tree Implementation of a Revit add-in progress bar Aborting a lengthy process from the progress bar Harry's image generation video competition A Walk in the Snow I went for a walk in snow... Read more →