The Building Coder

Refresh Element Graphics Display

Here is a little issue with an interesting workaround that I encountered in the past in similar incarnations in other CAD software packages besides Revit, so it is worthwhile making a note of this for potential future use almost anywhere. The issue has to do with refreshing the graphics display of individual elements in the Revit user interface. Committing the transaction, explicit regeneration, and even calling RefreshActiveView does not help. One additional thing that sometimes does help in similar situations... Read more →

Debugging an Add-in Without Restarting Revit

Here is a question that has come up again and again in recent years: Question: How can I avoid re-starting Revit after every change to my add-in code? It is very time consuming. Answer: Unfortunately, the Visual Studio 'Edit and Continue' feature does not work when developing Revit add-ins. Personally, I set up the Visual Studio project to start up Revit with a testing project already loaded, by appropriately setting up both the 'Start external program' and 'Command line arguments'... Read more →

Ritchie's Revit API Introduction

We have already seen a couple of interesting contributions by Ritchie Jackson of the Adaptive Architecture and Computation programme at UCL, the University College London: Blends, Hermite splines and derivatives Complexity versus constructability The Autodesk Project Vasari API Flattening a non planar extrusion profile Here is another topic, an introduction to the Revit API for programming novices for the London Revit User Group LRUG. Knowing Ritchie, it includes a couple of novel aspects: Focus on VSTA macros. Comparison of manual... Read more →

VSTA to Stay and Updater to Go

As you may have heard from Kean, we have safely arrived in Munich, Germany for the next developer conference, the biggest one in our European series. Actually, he only talks about his own arrival, but our arrival worked all right as well. One topic that we are discussing at these conferences is cloud computing, so it was a funny coincidence to run into a nice big tangible cloud when we went out to have a dinner with our developer partners... Read more →

New Sweep and References

Here is a question posted by Mike Cotreau of Langan Engineering & Environmental Services on how to create a new sweep using a reference array, which provided a welcome opportunity to explain a little about the use of references in the Revit API: Question: I want to use the NewSweep method to create a 3D curb line that follows along a path of 3D points. The NewSweep method can be invoked in two ways, one uses a ReferenceArray and the... Read more →

Revit API Introduction Webcast

I mentioned yesterday that the recording and materials of the Revit API Introduction webcast held last week on Wednesday April 29th is now available from the Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) DevTech API training schedule site. Filter for Revit API, English, Webcast and click on the download link to obtain the 45 MB zip file RevitAPI_2010_Webcast.zip. Besides the recording, it also includes the Powerpoint presentation, online questions and answers, the Revit API Introduction labs for both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008,... Read more →